Ughhhhh.....

Total disaster tonight with my Octa's. I cannot get my second Octa-Capture to show up at all as a valid audio device to be selected. It makes no sense. I disconnect everything but my keyboard and reboot so that nothing is running. I then connect the Octa captures up and I can only see the main one. The control panel shows them both and I have verified that I can control both of them from the control panel.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers twice to no avail. Did all the things Roland suggested in the readme. Again, no love. I wasted time I was looking forward to spending actually making some music on this nonsense. It had been nice and stable up till now. Last thing I had done before things went haywire was to install Diva. It is an absolute CPU killer with some patches in divine mode and I managed to spike out my CPU and shut down the audio engine a couple of times. I can't see how this would cause such mayhem but I just am out of ideas.

Ideas welcome. I had to give up playing tonight...am just so annoyed!

Ken

jkleban


Ken...

Sorry, no ideas here but it sounds like your problem is related to linking two Octa's?  Does it work fine with just one?

Jim

Yes it is fine with one but I need them both to work. I am going to try to roll back to the original drivers if possible and see what happens. The only issue with this (and a big one) is that the system software on each Octa has to be rolled back also and I don't know how nicely they will take to rolling back firmware.


Just such a drag....the fiance' went out with the girls last night and I was all excited to be left for hours to do nothing but play away. What a buzzkill!


Ken

Ken...

Thanks for the blow by blow update.... I feel bad because I am waiting for your saga to play out before I update.... looks like you have run the gamut though.. maybe this weekend.

Jim

I just ordered an octacapture (it will be here Thursday from sweetwater).  Looks like a mixed bag on the new version software/drivers.  Should I just go with the 1.0 version for a while or jump in with the 1.5?

fireberd


I just ordered an octacapture (it will be here Thursday from sweetwater).  Looks like a mixed bag on the new version software/drivers.  Should I just go with the 1.0 version for a while or jump in with the 1.5?

I can't say I am all that happy with the 1.5 drivers. Roland says they are supposed to be faster. I am definitely not seeing that at least in my setup. My computer is a very fast machine and I am getting dropouts that I never got in the initial driver version. Maybe it is a function of having two Octa-Captures but I have verified this with a single Octa-Capture running standalone. Same latency issues. I just don't get it.


The control panel for the newest drivers is WAY better but I would stick with the V1.0 drivers if I were you.


Ken

Well I experimented some more this morning. Turns out that the dropouts were related to having the two Octa-Captures linked together. In order for all 16 ports linked to show up as possible input sources in Sonar (or anything else for that matter) I had to go to the driver control panel and enable the VS-Expand option. Unfortunately, that seems to cause some noticeable glitches in the output. I was doing some midi scrubbing of a synth track in the PRV. My CPU load was light cause nothing was going on at all. No network device attached or anything. When I disable VS-Expand I lose the second Octa-Capture ports  (even though the devices are both linked and my input ports go over the link to the main outputs on the expander Octa-Capture) but the dropouts go away. This is almost certainly a clocking issue. Interestingly, if I turn off VS-Expand in the control panel it does NOT affect the settings on the Octa-Capture units. I don't know how to interpret this. 

I also crashed Sonar by changing the driver settings to enable the CPU efficiency mode. I guess Roland's view is that the CPU runs more efficiently if your applications crash and the CPU gets to idle more ;-)

I never had any of this happen with the V1.0 drivers. What a mess still. I have to find a way to revert back to V1.0. There really can't be a workaround to this as far as I can see.

Ken

jkleban


I did hear a rumor that when Ron Paul is close to this audio device, strange things have been known to occur.... Ken, is your system working today?

Jim
:-)

Ahhh....if it were only that simple. They have all left and moved on to South Carolina. My phone has stopped ringing with pollsters calling all day. Sadly, none of that has helped my Octa's work better ;-)


Roland does not have the V1.0 system software on their web site unfortunately so I have no idea how I am going to roll this back. I consoled myself by playing my grand piano for 2 hours today. I discovered it had zero latency issues, fantastic sound, and the audio engine never seemed to stop unexpectedly.


Ken

fireberd


Didn't you get an install CD with the original drivers on it when you got the Octa-Capture?   Mine will be in today and I expect there will be an install CD with the drivers included. 

The drivers are not the issue. I need the V1.0 firmware and I don't think that was on the install disk. That was already in the Octa-Capture hardware. I will have to hunt down my disks and check again. The V1 driver does not work with the V1.5 firmware unfortunately.

Such a drag dealing with all of this though. I definitely appreciate my zero latency grand piano. Kept me sane yesterday after this fiasco.


Ken

Sorry to hear they have no idea.  The V1.0 is built in and apparently not available as a software download.  Some firmware will not allow downgrading, so another issue.  I don't know that the downgrading is an issue with the Octa-Capture but something to consider. 

Also there are complaints on the Pro Tools forum of noise pops, cracks, etc with the V1.5 firmware and Pro Tools. 

I got my Octa-Capture this afternoon.  I'm not going to touch the firmware or control panel for a while, to make sure I want to keep it.  Even then I many not upgrade for a while with users here and on Pro Tools having similar problems.  It connected automatically when I started Sonar X1, didn't have to touch anything.  Surprisingly it plays well with Pro Tools 10, too.  I had a He.l of a time getting the Saffire Pro 40 to work with Pro Tools 10 and once I did get it working it was flakey.

Guitarpima


I wonder? If someone who has not updated to the new firmware can do the two button OC startup so the computer sees a new drive can check something?

When you do the two button power up is there anything in the new drive that's on the OC. If so, could it be the 1.0 firmware? Granted, this is a risky thing to try it. Someone could image that drive and send it along to you. Seems very risky though.

Well that is definitely a clever idea but I am also pretty nervous about the risk factor on that one. I am going to run some more experiments today cause I have some ideas about what might be going on here. So....my electrical engineering hat will be on instead of my keyboard hat. Maybe if I make the hat out of tin foil and put some nice wires in it I will receive messages telling me what the problem really is ;-)


Ken

jkleban


Damn Ken...

An EE... you should be designing these things for us from a REAL USER point of view.

Than we can all complain about you hehehehe

Jim

 
Haha...I have plenty of people willing to complain about me....stand in line ;-) I have degrees in Electrical Engineering and Chemistry but ended up being a software engineer/architect for my entire career. Still always was real into music though. I would have been a horrid pure EE for a living.
 
I have isolated the problem down to the VS-Expand option in the driver config menu of the Control Panel. If that is on then all hell breaks loose. If I shut that off then I don't get the digital pops. The problem is that if that is shut off then I can't see my second set of Octa-Capture ports from the ASIO driver. It was NOT that way in the V1.0 firmware/driver combination. That option did NOT exist even. The documentation claims it is just status monitoring but I claim the docs are most definitely incorrect on this.
 
I had a theory that allowing multiple output sources in the mixer menu might be overloading the Octa's at 96K but that is most definitely NOT the issue at all. Active or muted inputs/outputs have no bearing on the problem. I also hooked up a second SP/DIF cable to go from the output of the second Octa back to the input of the first just to see if somehow that was now required but I got the same clocking noise and distortion I had when I originally determined this was a real bad idea back when I first got these two units.
 
My next step is to replicate the project that I know causes the problems but put it at a 44.1 Khz sample rate and see if that makes a difference or not. I suspect it will and that this was never properly tested. Right now I am on DVD 9 of my 12 DVD Ivory 2 Upright Piano's installation so that is on hold.
 
Ken

fireberd


So, I get it the problem is not with a standalone Octa-Capture, but when it's used with a VS unit?
 
Inquiring minds want to know.  I'm a retired Computer network manager and worked as a NASA programmer on the Apollo project, and was an amp tech in Nashville.

My setup is two Octa-Captures together where the second Octa-Capture is used to provide me 8 more ports for expansion. This is one of the documented features of the Octa-Capture and why I bought it in the first place. It used to work in the V1.0 firmware perfectly. The latest update broke it. I don't have issues running one unit alone although I think the latency increased with the latest release.


I don't know if the same problem exists for a VS-700  using an Octa-Capture as an 8 port expansion. Somehow I suspect that works fine cause that would likely have been tested. Pure speculation on my part and I would love to hear from anyone running the V1.5 driver/firmware combination with a VS-700 and Octa-Capture strapped together.


More testing today. I will post results as soon as I get them.


Ken

Jim,  I'm more traditonal (older) country but last summer I tracked a Pedal Steel for a studio in New Zealand on a Dylan song (You Ain't Goin Nowhere).

If you like the current stuff, check out Robert Randolph and his pedal steel.  Doesn't sound anything like country rock.

Back on subject, I would like to know if it's safe for a one octa-capture unit too.

OK folks here is the latest results from my experiments. Sorry it took so long but I got an emergency call to fix a network. I knew I should have taken that tin foil hat off....it attracts problems ;-)

My latest experiment was to replicate my problematic project that was running at a 96 Khz sample rate and see if I had the same issues with the Octa-Captures set at 44.1 Khz. My hope was that if it worked fine at 44.1 Khz I would sacrifice what is really an unnecessarily high (for me) sample rate to be able to run both units together as before. Oh the fun and joy converting a project over to a new sample rate. I will spare the horror in this particular thread and just get to the conclusions.

The same problem occurs at 44.1 Khz as at 96 Khz. I get awful popping and clicking indicating frame drops and/or clock slips between the Octa-Captures with the VS-Expand option selected. I could mask this by putting my buffers up to 256 which would give me an 18 ms latency number but that really was only masking the problem. Anything less than 256 buffers at 44.1 Khz with VS-Expand selected in the driver options of the ASIO Control Panel caused badness.

When I uncheck VS-Expand I lose my ability to see my expansion Octa-Capture ports. The problems I was having with the audio go away completely and I can run the exact same project without any dropouts with 64 buffers. I have a very fast CPU so the additional interrupt overhead did not make a meaningful difference in this scenario. I never got a single core above 35% or so. Note that the two Octa-Captures ARE still sending data over the SP/DIF port because I have configured them from the panels to have VS-Expand enabled. My master Octa-Capture sends all the audio to the slave Octa-Capture which is in turn hooked up to my amplifier. This is different from the driver mode setting of VS-Expand. I am going to guess that the Windows driver ultimately will be the faulty software for this setup. I know this is very confusing. Flatly, Roland blew it on this one.

So, for those interested in upgrading to V1.5 I would say you are perfectly OK as long as you do not have to link your Octa-Capture together with another Octa-Capture through the SP/DIF port. If you have to link your devices I would say stay away from V1.5 like the plague.

I hope this has been helpful.

Ken

Guitarpima


Just out of curiosity Inaheartbeat, How is your OC connected? An add in usb card or off the motherboard? I think I read in the documentation to use the motherboard's usb.

HTH

Right off the motherboard for both of them. I have what is effectively a very high powered laptop as my DAW.


Ken