LIQUID MIX 2.0 WORKS + Configuration Tips + User expereinces

Hi guys, The firewire tip in here will also be very useful to anyone running firewire soundcards on SP2, and this is new info, its nothing to do with the patch, I will reveal all in good time.

For reference everything below was done using Sonar PE vs 6.2.1 and LM vs 1.5.5

After spending more time than i would care to think about i have sorted out LM (I think)

There are two issues affecting people

1)A saved project with too many instances in it will not load, after being saved. My 'test' (its not a flipping test its supposed to be mixed by thursday) project has 5 stereo instances of LM plus a further 6 mono instances, so it has a blend of both and a total of 16 channels, (So far the record is 12 instances) and was refusing to load after saving.

I got to thinking it dies at load up, so its probably not talking to the firewire card properly, so i read up again saw a post about the Microsoft patch for Firwire in SP2. For those of you who don't know about this this patch is to do with the fact that in SP1 firewire could happily run at speeds upto and including 800, but in SP2 they accidently throttled it back to 100 seriously limiting bandwidth. This does not affect speed of transfer but how much you get down the pipe at one time, significant at load up where the LM jsut seems to time out.

Anyway i read the forum and dimissed this being the cause of the LM issue because i had already installed that patch,= in an effort to sort out issues with my MOTU 828 to no avail, however being thorough i again checked the MS update page in question, and unsually for me i read the support notes.

It turns out its not just enough to install this patch. In fact all this patch does is configure SP2 so that the firewire bandwidth can now be set in the registry, you still have to manually change the registry setting yourself to configure it. I.e both my firwire cards were still running at 100.

I went into the registry and located both my firewire cards HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CURRENTCONTROLSET/ENUM/yourcardpart1/yourcardpart2. To find out your specific card numbers go to device manager and look up there properties there, big long alphanumeric no's one long line seperated by a /.

Anyway once into your firewire card(s) in the registry go to the Device Parameters folder in here you will need to add a DWORD value called SidSpeed. This value can then be configured accordingly in decimal.

0 = 100
1 = 200
2 = 400
3 = 400-800

I set both my cards (one discreet to soundcard one discreet to Liquid mix) to setting 3.

I then restarted.

I loaded the LM manager software, this loaded noticably faster than before. I then loaded the project, from file menu, not the wizard, and the project loaded up, takes about 2 mins, but did not hang then suddenly all your stuff pops up, and I was good to go again.

Be warned if you have closed all your GUI's for the LM it won't pick up your custom names in the hardware, the workaround to this is to leave them open, and i have found the most stable and easy to manage way to do this is to right click on them and enable tabs, so they appear in the tab menu at the bottom of the track view, very useful bit of kit that when you have seventeen millioni plugins and 'jsut' 2 monitors.

Interestingly this is also worth trying for firewire soundcard users as projects that click and popped before at lower latencies (they are biggies 45 tracks plus, i am only running a 2.4 P4) now run smooth at the lower latencies, so I think this has also helped my soundcard i/o significantly.

2) The getting a sound from a mono instance of LM even when gain make up is 0, okay this was a problem in earlier version of Sonar, but its fixed, however you will hear a tiny amount of source coming though this plugin even with the input and output at minumum, thats becuase they don't go to 0. Don't believe me then go to the option on the mono pluginin plugin windows and click mono enabled off, suddently that second sound becomes huge as loud as the one coming through the plug, sound like stereo. I tried this on a solo's bass track (which was mono). Anyhoo some audiophilemay not be able to deal with this but personally in a mix context this was fine for, I only noticed it when i went looking for it based on reading the forums researching the above issue. Some may disagree.

EDIT Just try droppin te gain makeup and input ona stero instance and low and behold there was also sound coming through and the same very low level as on the mono plugin. I think the plugin is designed to have a low source level at al times. Beware as i did spending hours trying to fix it. There is a real problem with earlier versions of Sonar where the force to mono is not activeon the mono plug.

Good luck everyone, sorry for war and peace, but hopefuly this info will help people even if they don't own a LM

G

Just edited the title, hopefully more descriptive

G

Pleasure mate,

I jsut really wanted to get it to work.

My decision to use SidSpeed 3 was based on the fact that although conceivably there is no dfference to us using Firewire 400 whether we use option 2 (400) or option 3 (400 to 800) when i looked up what the original setting had been in Windows SP1 it was the 400-800 setting, so I figured if that was the holy grail that everyone says worked why mess with it. 3 works a treat

When you open beware its still not a quick process, here are the steps

1) Turn on PC
2) Initialize LM software, minimize, but do not close.
3) Fire up Sonar, close out of the open last file new file wizard (if you have that enabled)
4) Load up file from File menu
5) At this point it will still look a bit like its hanging be patient it can take about a minute or 2, then suddenly bang all your plugs will load. Sometimes the Sonar window whites out for about 2 secs just before everything pops up.

I think one other problem maybe the timeout Sonar has set for plugin load up, ie how long it will wait for a plug to laod before dying. Any Bakers out there want to elaborate on if this is a parameter that exists and is it something that can be tweaked in teh reg, or is it advisable not too etc.

Yeah I really like the enable tabs thing, I set up my mixer in my left monitor, above my MCU so it liek a visual representation, then in the right hand one i have the track view with about an inch of it showing the tracks to kind of act like a map to where i am in the song, then i have the Tab window open almost 3/4's screen and put all my effects in there, then i can get to them really easy just like using tabs in an excell spreadsheet, massively improves workflow, not just with LM.

You sure its the problem with the Mono

Like I said i get backgrond noise on both the mono and stereo plug, when the gain makup and everything is turned off. I am not sure that you can turn it off completely apart from by turning it off in the fx bin?

I did a mix (finally) last night with it, and its was sounding fat and i did not notice this issue in the mix, no weird drums noises or anything along those lines.

Goodluck with the stuff above, and let us know whether it helps?

Yeah I nearly contemplated dusting of my SX3, that shows you how serious this nearly got, I really really don't want to go back to the Steiny world.

just a few of my findings
1 I tried the beta version of LM manager and it still hung up after all the patching and registry edits, so I am back to LM 1.5.5 and it seems to work ok
2. I dont seem to have to run LM manager first, whenever it comes time to load the LM fx the runtime app in LM loads and so do all the plugins. I tried both ways , running manager first and then not,, made not a difference
3. on a project where i had 4 stereo plugs and 2 mono plugs for some reason i could not click on one of the instances of a plug in and bring up the gui, it was a bass track, all the other guis would pop up... I can access that particular plug from the LM hardware controller , but not from the pc... wierd...

From the Microsoft site

SYMPTOMS
After you update your computer to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the performance of your 1394a or 1394b FireWire devices may be greatly decreased. A digital camera that uses S400 speed is an example of such a device.

Bit Flipper thats not quite accurate, I installed straight to SP2, and that patch was included, that patch alone is not the cure

The fact remains that you still have to manually configure the Firewire SidSpeed, for any firwire cards added after the patch is installed it is not automatically set by this patch. This patch just gives you the ability to set it. In fact the link to the support page you kindly included (I should have done that) actually says that if you read further down to the blurb.

Microsoft"After you install this update, if you add a host controller for a new 1394 device to your computer, you must add or modify the SidSpeed entry in the Windows registry for the new 1394 host controller" Follow bitflippers link to see teh mocrosoft instructions on how to do this, or read my original post at the top.

More importantly its about results i had a project taht would not open after i tried evervy possible combination of versions.

It only started loading after I chnaged my SidSpeeds to 3.

Note yes the LM will intialize without the Software being run first, but as me and Dunch suspect this is an issue with Sonar timing out at load in because the LM load time is quite long, its one less thing for the LM to do during the start up of the project.

Hmmm Just a thought but i believe reading somewhere that 1394b can handle either 400 or 800 whereas 1394a can only handle 400.

Is it possible that the card makers use the 1394b controller even for there 400 cards jsut to give more headroom,/future proofing, ie they can then buy card in bulk at a saving and know there can use the same components for both 400 and the coming 800 cards?

I.e my card is advertised as a 400 and has the 400 connector type, but it could be the controller running it is 1394b? This would explain why the tweak worked

I have nothing to back this up at the moment, but it might be worth checking the website of your cards manufacturer and seeing exactly what controller is present.

I still think its worth trying anyway, will be interested to see if you have any luck.

Agreed

My pet theory is that there is a parameter somewhere in Sonar htat says how long it hsould wait for plugins to load up, and that if this could be extended there would be no issue.

The SidSpeed is an attempt to treat the symptom (and also help irwire in general), in that becuase SOnar has this limitation on load time, you want to get as much data being transfered as quickly as poss.

Sidspeed of 400 equals greater amount of data transfered than 100. So lets say it takes 4 minutes to open LM in 100 mode, then a 4 fold increase in data flow, will mean that will know only take 1 minute, hopefull in time to not time out Sonar.

The ultimate fix to this would be to find out how to change Sonar's timeout on Plugin load up.

Come on Moderators, any answers on whether this is configurable in the registry/ potential pitfalls of doing so?

G

No joy for me, I'm afraid. SidSpeed was already set to 2, and Sonar still hangs with SidSpeed =3.

Gordon, your system seems a bit more resistant to this problem than mine. I fear I will be waiting for Cakewalk to come up with a fix for the Sonar problem (and in the meantime getting to know P5 much better!)

See also the MS hotfix KB904412. It helped me just that extra little bit. I'm surprised I only heard about it yesterday.

@ gordon - I finally got round to trying sidspeed = 3. No help I'm afraid.

@ SledDog - thanks - I ran the hotfix and managed to load a test project with 32 LM channels, which is a first for me. It wouldn't play however - CPU spikes and audio dropouts.

I now seem to be able to load and play a test project with 24 instances of the LM fairly consistently, though sluggishly, and play it. That's probably more than enough for me, to be honest. I'm not out of the woods yet though, because I have another test with one instance that won't play at all.

I'd love either Focusrite or Cakewalk to test this out properly and get back to us on whether it's something they are prepared to look at. I have contacted both support teams but it's gobe very quiet. I don't feel confident enough yet that the LM + Sonar combination is workable in a real-life situation.

cheers
A

when I reloaded all teh audio into a new project it worked again, it was almost as though the projectitself had become corrupted.

FWIW, I've seen this numerous times over the years...
In particular, after moving to a new version of Sonar.

Pasting the tracks into a new (fresh) project solved drop-outs/glitches/etc...

There is no such timeout on plugin load in SONAR. If there is a "timeout" it would be in the plugin.
As of SONAR 6.2 when we load VST plugins we instantiate them and load their persisted program data.
However the plugin's are NOT resumed until the first time the transport is rolled (or of course, if you have input monitoring on they will be resumed immediately after the project has loaded.) Once plugins are resumed they stay in a resumed state forever until bypassed.
If the plugin's are hanging on startup it seems to indicate to me that they are relying on being resumed to load their state - which seems backwards. A plugin should be able to load irrespective of whether it is running. Not sure if this is the problem here but it could be whats going on.

ORIGINAL: gordonrussell76

Agreed

My pet theory is that there is a parameter somewhere in Sonar htat says how long it hsould wait for plugins to load up, and that if this could be extended there would be no issue.

The SidSpeed is an attempt to treat the symptom (and also help irwire in general), in that becuase SOnar has this limitation on load time, you want to get as much data being transfered as quickly as poss.

Sidspeed of 400 equals greater amount of data transfered than 100. So lets say it takes 4 minutes to open LM in 100 mode, then a 4 fold increase in data flow, will mean that will know only take 1 minute, hopefull in time to not time out Sonar.

The ultimate fix to this would be to find out how to change Sonar's timeout on Plugin load up.

Come on Moderators, any answers on whether this is configurable in the registry/ potential pitfalls of doing so?

G

Thank you Gordon for this tip and all your work on it, this is the best one since sliced bread was invented, I use an mLAN setup with Yamaha 01x and Motif es6 both on firewire, had some songs where I had to push the asio driver up to 20ms to play them all the way through without dropouts, now down to 5.1ms will play any of them.
Many thanks

Roy