Sonar X1C and Roland OctaCapture 1.5 Driver Problem

  Greetings this is my first post, thank you for all the great info and resources. I've recently (this week) updated my Octa Capture drivers to version 1.5 and am now experience a couple issues in Sonar X1c. 1) On certain plugins (perhaps all of them, not sure yet as the problem surfaced last nigh), there seems to be a background fuzz noise that ramps up and then dissipates when bypassing the plugin...the issue didnt exist on the driver version 1.0, all other factors being controlled for (meaning I didnt change anything within the project file whatsoever). Is this a Sonar issue or hardware driver issue? It sounds like white noise gradually building in volume until I play the music or tweak a plugin...then it fades off. 2) Sonar crashed (froze) a couple times and the hardware subsequently locked up on an audible glitch that remained even after force quitting Sonar. 3) My most frequent Sonar X1 problems seem related to Bit Bridge; when I do the task manager I will see the bitbridge held up sometimes upwards of 400k usage in processes...like there is a bridging conflict. 4) With the new driver there are more audible pops and glitches in VSTi realtime playing, all er parameters being controlled for. Especially in IK Multimedia one. 5) Lastly, updating the driver did something weird to the input echo arming only on midi/instrument tracks. When I opened Sonar for the first time after driver update, VSTi tracks now had the input echo buttons turned on with a little "A" inside them...now whenever I just highlight a track it automatically arms the input echo...I don't have to push the specific echo button???? ...I've done all the appropriate tweaks...turned off or disabled hardware, power settings, aeros, paging, jbridge, UAC, different USB hubs, grounding issues, buffer settings.... The only thing I'm reluctant to do is reinstall Sonar and go through all that. Anyone know of or experience similar issues? Should I roll back the driver to 1.0 where it seemed to work better? The drivers are brand new, so there isnt really any info on this I can find yet. Thanks for any info. Computer is W7 64bit i7 16gb ram, no wifi, no antivirus, SSD, NVIDIA graphics

OK I just checked the Roland site for driver updates and I see no mention of anything except version 1.00 for the Octa-Capture. This is the version I am already running. Where did you see a version 1.5? Are you sure you are running the correct drivers? I am going to guess not and that is your problem.

Ken

http://www.roland.com/sup...&p=UA-1010&id=62226714

So lo and behold look  what  message just popped up on the Roland site for the newest drivers:

---

[style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250); "]* Uninstall the old driver before you install the new driver.For details on the uninstallation procedure, refer to the Readme.htm file that was created when you extracted the archive.
* When you use this driver version, the OCTA-CAPTURE system program must be updated to the latest version (Ver.1.5.0 or later).
[style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(250, 250, 250); "]

This was not on the site less than an hour ago when I checked. I am guessing that some of this might be related to what you are seeing. Not sure but it is definitely interesting that this JUST got put up on the site.

Ken

JingleBells


Well I guess I'm the first public guinea pig then! Yeah I noticed that post. Fortunately, I did the install correctly and updated the Octa Capture system firmware first as per the directions (they actually queue you on the install order, which "I guess" is helpful). It was pretty easy and setup without a hitch, but alas I'm anticipating bugs like everything else...I will roll back tonight and post results afterwards. I double checked the software glitches on another old project and they indeed existed there as well. Hopefully someone from Roland/Cakewalk will catch this thread and comment.

Well thanks for taking the bullets for me then ;-) I will wait till you roll back and confirm that you don't have an issue doing it before I plunge in. I would love to get the latency lower as a matter of principle but it works great now so it is really not a necessity for me. Let me know how it goes.


Ken

You know what's really weird... somebody told me that version 1.5 was out a couple of weeks ago and being up there is age, when I went to the US ROLAND site, I saw only version 1.0, so I figured I must have dreamt this... but I also remember something about USB 3.0 in the discussion as well but forgot what the point was.

Tanks for clearin dis up.

Jim

"Ironically, in the Cakewalk hardware forum folks were talking about this a while ago and apparently there are several very happy people with the drivers including Cakewalk staff" So happy and confident that they don't press release or reveal them to US market. Sounds like a public beta to me. ...rolled back tonight, problem disappeared. Rolled forward, problems reappeared. Rolled back and am staying where everything was stable. I jumped off a bridge in my mind. :)

Ok well I did the upgrade to 1.5 for BOTH of my Octa-Captures since you can't just do one of them as I found out. So far it seems to be working fine although it did not make my latency numbers go down at all. I suspect this is a consequence of using 2 Octa-Captures strapped together to expand to 16 total ports.

As far as getting noise I noticed that if I enabled the VS Expand checkbox it made everything sound awful. If you read the documentation it says that it only reports on the status of the link between the two units. Well....it sure does more than that cause if I run without that checked it works fine but not if it is checked.

Here is the detailed way I did my install. If you did it differently maybe things screw up. I was paranoid.

I first uninstalled the Octa-Capture drivers and unplugged all my USB devices except for my mouse per instructions.

I then put the first Octa-Capture into software update mode by holding down the button combination and then putting the power on. When it said to connect the USB cable I did so and the device came up as a disk on my computer.

I copied the software onto the virtual Octa-Capture disk drive per instructions and waited till it was done then disconnected the USB cable. When it said it was done and ready for reboot I power cycled it. It came up on V1.5.

I repeated the above for my second Octa-Capture which is slaved to the first one. Also no problems.

I disconnected the USB cables again and installed the V1.5 windows drivers. When it told me to I plugged my Octa-Capture in to the USB port and it said the drivers were successfully installed.

I had to reboot a couple of times but then Sonar X1c saw all 16 of my ports per usual. I played without any issues then decided to see what would happen if I popped the sample buffer size down to 96 samples at 96Khz. Bad idea cause I got dropouts. I was running Geist, Stylus RMX, Kontakt, Nexus 2, and Z3Ta 2 on my project at the time. I had a lot of stuff going on so it really did not shock me that this was a bad idea. When I put my buffers back up to 192 everything worked fine.

So....at least I did not have to jump off a roof. I wonder how low my latency could go if I did not have two Octa-Captures strung together?

Ken

Been playing around with the new stuff this morning and am finding it is very stable and my latencies are all fine. I stupidly had Norton on in my DAW (I know....****ed...). Instead of just disabling it as usual I uninstalled it and got down to 8.1 ms round trip latency with no dropouts while running Stylus RMX, Z3Ta 2, and Nexus 2 together in real time. I didn't feel it was necessary to push things so I put my buffers back up and am running with 10 ms latency round trip just to avoid any possibility of dropouts. All looks well.

I really like the new interface to the Octa-Capture control panel. A major improvement. Based on my limited experience I would say go for the update but be aware of how I did it (which was exactly how the documentation said to do it) if you want to have the best chance at avoiding problems.

Ken

jkleban


Nashua huh?  I used to live in Keene about 10 years ago.... I told all of my friends that NH was GREAT for the 3 months it wasn't WINTER. 


I probably will try this as soon as my current project is completed (probably this weekend depending on how my Hammond organ tracks get completed (it is a real bear to mic up a LESLIE and get it to sound GREAT).

Jim

Hey I love NH all the time :-) Try VB3 and you don't have to set up any of that stuff.


Ken

I saw this thread last night and just updated. No issues at all.

Driver set to 48 samples.
Input latency is 5.6 ms at 249 samples.
Output latency is 1.8 at 81 samples
Total roundtrip latency is 7.5 ms at 330 samples.

I forgot to check these setting before I updated. Love the UI for the mixer! This is definitly a great improvement.

JB... thanks for the update ... maybe I will wait.... I know that bridge and bit bridge aren't the most stable things under W7 x64.....

The teleport program keeps hanging... sometimes, a restart does the trick but most of the time, a reboot is required... it doesn't happen too often but every time is does, the damn TELEPORT program is the culprit....  I don't know if TELEPORT is a utility but it was used when I used to run a server farm for my VSTs to work around the 2GB LIMIT in Win 32 bit (I hated there too, the same thing would happen occasionally (randomly too)... but that was worse because I had to reboot all the PCs when that happen (THE DAW and all the REMOTES PCs running VSTis)....

Can't wait until all plugs are 64 bit.... I just have a couple that I have to bridge now other than the UAD2 stuff (UA announced that x64 will be available before the end of 2012).....

I abandoned Altiverb already because it is horrible in the bit bridge mode...

Jim

Guitarpima

JingleBells


  Hey guys glad some of you are having good luck with this. Unfortunately I have to convey some more bad news; I've reinstalled one more time....this driver seems extremely unstable. I DL-ed 2x directly from the Roland site...yes I followed the directions perfectly. What I'm noticing is a degradation of signal over multiple open/close cycles. Especially in VSTi within X1 and already recorded analog tracks...there is a granular white noise and compromised fidelity that is detectable and gets worse over a session. This is very strange, but I am able to replicate the behavior. The climax of the problem has another symptom I just picked up...somehow once the driver function starts wasting away, all the windows 7 sounds mute out and don't function...like Sonar or the device is locking up any non-sonar audio. The windows sounds (beeps, bells, etc) return immediately after reinstalling....WEIRD! For those skeptical, I am using 100% authentic software, licensed copy of W7 Ultimate, no bloatware whatsoever...just Sonar X1, jbridge, my plugs, all onbard graphics and audio disabled, no antivirus, etc. This is a relatively new system working flawlessly before. NOTE: The problem doesnt come up when I open VSTi in standalone mode. My MOTU Electric Keys sounds noticably better in standalone than in Sonar now. Upon rollback, all back to normal. I'll keep troubleshooting, hopefully this post will help out some others.

I hope you get this figured out soon. It took me an hour to figure out that I had to update the firmware for the OC so the drivers would work. Duh for me! lol!
 
Maybe this is related. Even when I had an E-MU 1616m, the sound would wither away. It's been a while but I think it was some patches in DP and other synth that were causing it. I never figured out why other than to stop using those synth and use something else. I only use synths till I don't need them with the exception of Addictive Drums.
 
BTW - How did you guys roll back to the 1.00 driver? I thought I read that the 1.00 driver would not work with the new firmware.
 
Good luck!

Yea I was really careful to update the OC's firmware first before even trying to use the new drivers. I have had numerous opens and closes of the project I was working on and absolutely no issues at all with degradations or anything. I have JBridge installed and it is a non-issue although I am not using any 32 bit plugs on this particular project I am running. I did have Geist crash on me but that had happened before so that was really not a driver issue.


One thing that is sort of weird is I cannot get my samples down below 96. Not that I want to run that low but I see it should go lower. I wonder if it is a function of having the two Octa-Captures strapped together. 


Bottom line though for me is everything seems to be working just fine still.


Ken

There's a new checkbox in the driver settings that let's you reduce the CPU load. Did you try that?

I used to have a problem with noise as well. I use track presets and some of them were the cause. I revamped all my track presets and that solved that one. Other than that, good luck!

jkleban


I agree with everything flows..... if you turn up the monitor volume so you can hear what is being tracking in real time as well as the existing tracks, you do get a lot of (white) noise....  however, if I use an external PRE AMP to normalize the input signal, I can keep the OCTOPUS preamp lower and the white noise disappears... 

I have noticed that the internal OCTO pre-amps are a bit noisy when pushed too hard....

Jim

Yea I would not have noticed that as much in my setup cause the only channel I regularly have my pre's on at all is the one with my Waldorf Blofeld to compensate for it's low input signal. When I use a mic I use a Grace One for my pre-amp and then direct into an Octa-Capture channel.
 
You could maybe tame that white noise down a little by using the gate function for your Octa-Capture channels. I have mine set up as a noise gate for my Juno 106 cause even when not playing a key if you have certain patches going you can hear the lfo's working across a filter sweep of the noise from the output of the keyboard. I set my noise gate for that keyboard at -52 dB and that takes care of that issue for me. Not sure if it is as appropriate for you cause your noise floor may be significantly higher.
 
Things are all still very stable here so far.
 
Ken