Issues with MOTU Ultralite Mk3

[UNISONDETUNE]

I am reporting several issues in this post. I have received the MOTU Ultralite Mk3 Hybrid two days ago, and chose it as the moment to upgrade to Windows 7 (which has proved to perform well on my bandmate's PC together with Ableton Live 8.1, running with the Novation Xio ASIO drivers). I had to do a backup due to a mismatch in the installation languages

The Ultralite itself has great hardware and software components; I connected it to the USB2 port of my Dell Studio 1735 laptop (2.4GHz Penryn T8300, 4Gb RAM, 500 Gb HDD) and installed the supplied drivers, which are already updated to the latest version.

After the setup of the drivers and CueMix FX software, I opened Ableton Live. The main reason why I purchased this audio card for my home studio is the possibility of using its internal mixing both in studio and stage situations; it has exactly the same number of inputs I'd need to do a complete routing of microphones and synthesizers on stage, together with personal monitoring for the both of us.

I opened one of our projects (pre-MOTU, we were working smoothly with the Novation Xio) and immediately the CPU use started going to around 45-50% (which was unusual for that track). I tried to tune up the MOTU sample buffer but it just keeps giving glitches and occasional dropouts proportionally as the buffer gets smaller (and so the latency). At 512 samples the card is usable, but the latency compared to an el-cheapo all-in-one like the Xio is way too high.
Also, while playing in loop a part of the track there would be slowdowns in the playback and occasionally the audio would drop out and a very brief high pitched "beep" would happen.

So I tried to set up a very basic arrangement with two vocal tracks and a drumkit. I turned the audio track monitoring to "off" to hear the zero-latency direct monitoring from the MOTU. I started to record and the sluggish slowdown-beep happened. Then I managed to record a part which sounds like it's bitcrushed directly from the input.

I know this is not Ableton Live's fault, and I am writing in order to get support from people using an Ultralite with the Ableton software on Windows. My objective is to set up a zero latency live monitoring bus for microphone & synthesizers, and have a decent recording setup worth the 500€ spent on the new device.

I already filed a "TechLink" (cool word for complaining) to MOTU.

[ronin]

Hiya mate,

I can't offer any advice myself but I have the 'audio dropout/beeping noise' problem too when I'm working in Ableton.
Seems fine when I'm working with it hooked up to my desktop, but on the laptop this beep can become quite regular.
Please let me know if you find any solutions to it.... I thought at one point I sorted it but it seems to be back, with a vengeance.

Thanks,
Ronin

[UNISONDETUNE]

Hiya mate,

I can't offer any advice myself but I have the 'audio dropout/beeping noise' problem too when I'm working in Ableton.
Seems fine when I'm working with it hooked up to my desktop, but on the laptop this beep can become quite regular.
Please let me know if you find any solutions to it.... I thought at one point I sorted it but it seems to be back, with a vengeance.

Thanks,
Ronin

I honestly think it's due to some kind of IRQ issue. The DPC Latency Checker test indicates there might be unresolved IRQ issues in my Dell laptop for audio-video streams. I am hopefully resolving the problem with the purchase of an Apple Macbook, but I have been contacted back by the MOTU Tech Support and they are working on more stable USB support on Windows.

Good luck