Ableton Forum

Anyone have any problems with the Ultralite and WinXP? I'm planning on getting one of these soon.

Nope - sweet as a nut.

Like so many other people, I can't get this thing to work properly under winXP. I tried all of the workarounds in this article:

http://thoughtyard.com/twiki/bin/view/M ... TechReview

but it still goes crazy several times a day.

So I'm going to have to sell this thing and go back to using M-Audio or Edirol. It's too bad, because it's a cool box - if only it worked...not to mention the $$ and time wasted on this.

anybody know how to get XP to know that the Ultralite is your main audio device in the sound settings??
Mine just says MOTU Main Outs, but the main volume controls and stuff are greyed out so i cant use the volume controller on my pc keyboard to turn the sound up and down....

Hi all. Thought I'd register my experience and keep the thread alive. I have a Rain Livebook Pro which I believe is equipped with the TI Firewire chipset and I get this problem all the time. My personal experience combined with research done online in many forums has told me that the Ultralite is cool-looking, but sadly completely unpredictable and unreliable on PCs and Macs - regardless of the presence or absence of a Texas Instruments firewire chipset. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed with a firmware update or something and Ultralite is listening to what people say in forums, otherwise I just can't recommend their products to anyone. What would really be cool is if MOTU got their shit together with a fix before I have to go and buy a new interface.
That said, what do the burned-and-shy uber-cautious turn to after they admit they've lost the war? Presonus and Focusrite have some pretty sweet-looking firewire stuff out, but if a company with a great reputation like MOTU can turn out to be completely the wrong choice like they have, who actually is reliable? Is there a similar campaign of silence regarding the fallibility of these other products as well? Is firewire itself the problem? Sure, it's got way better overall throughput than USB2, but if it has to crap its pants at regular intervals and some USB thing from E-MU doesn't, it'd be worth it to "downgrade" to a "chintzier" piece of hardware to avoid having your entire performance rig suddenly evaporate periodically right in front of everyone at the club.
The last posts to this thread were quite a while ago, so any of you who are Watching and get pinged by this response, I'd very much like to know what your solutions have turned out to be since then.

PS - Also, what's the deal with the "11-12" stuff in the master out? Why don't MOTU just use 1-2 like everyone else?
PPS - Can you imagine actually daisy-chaining like 4 of these time-bombs for more I/O like they say you can? Hah.

Wow. has it been a year already? Time flew. Anyways I never had any issues with my Ultralite after that day. Must have been some weird system glitch. I don't have my Ultralite anymore. Upgraded to an RME fireface 800... but I AM missing it.

The Fireface is great, but now that I've sold a lot of gear, feels a bit like overkill. The Ultralite was ideal. Best of luck to all the XP users!

I had this problem on a PC. To solve it, I switched firewire cards.
I know that is impossible with a MBP, but perhaps the info is helpful?

It's a Motu conspiracy. 2009 they programmed the Mark 2 units to start with the crackles and pops. Now you go buy a Mark 3.

the_planet wrote:I had this problem on a PC. To solve it, I switched firewire cards.
I know that is impossible with a MBP, but perhaps the info is helpful?

not for me. This thread is already a year old, and I don't have the UL anymore (

Anyways, as I said, it only glitched out that one time, then worked perfectly throughout the rest of the time I had it.

Seems that PC peeps are having a bad time with it though. Haven't MOTU interfaces always been horrible with PC's? Or so I've read/heard.

aqua_tek wrote:

the_planet wrote:I had this problem on a PC. To solve it, I switched firewire cards.
I know that is impossible with a MBP, but perhaps the info is helpful?

not for me. This thread is already a year old, and I don't have the UL anymore (

Anyways, as I said, it only glitched out that one time, then worked perfectly throughout the rest of the time I had it.

Seems that PC peeps are having a bad time with it though. Haven't MOTU interfaces always been horrible with PC's? Or so I've read/heard.

I think in the earliest days that might have been true, also there was a driver update that they put out that was somewhat disastrous. But I run the dreaded Vista (albeit 32 bit) and have not had problems. But I did have some of the same static-y blasting to start with also, and then updated firmware, made sure I had the latest drivers, unplugged things, plugged them again, and things worked. It seemed like there was some kind of 'sync up' that has to happen, then everything is solid therafter.

my ultralite, and 828 mkII before that, has occasionally done 'the spaz' since day one. on XP, vista, and even win 7 x64 (though much less often.)

it always seems to happen when either quicktime or the adobe flash player are starting up. this is problematic when your job is developing media for the web.

That sounds more like my story. I've been noticing it more lately, too - If I have a lot of tabs open in Chrome or use Quicktime, Flash, Rhapsody, what-have-you, it's often at that sort of point of audio/video "load" that the MOTU craps its pants, and the more stuff I've got going on, the more likely it is to do so. But it'll also do it (though less often) if absolutely nothing is going on. Have you switched to something else or just kept rolling with it for now like me?

Widows XP user here and i'm also experiencing this problem with my Ultralight. it's happening randomly, i still didn't figure out why and when it's going to happen'. i have newest drivers and all that...

Teedub wrote:That sounds more like my story. I've been noticing it more lately, too - If I have a lot of tabs open in Chrome or use Quicktime, Flash, Rhapsody, what-have-you, it's often at that sort of point of audio/video "load" that the MOTU craps its pants, and the more stuff I've got going on, the more likely it is to do so. But it'll also do it (though less often) if absolutely nothing is going on. Have you switched to something else or just kept rolling with it for now like me?

i'm rolling with it for now, since i'm using the analog/cv powers of the motu stuff a whole lot. it's a trade off.

No problems here, been using mine for over 2 years on a macbook pro. one of the best investments ive made.