Windows XP SP3 Firewire & Motu Traveller

[Jan Huewel]

While working on a regular Windows XP machine I got the following error when trying to use a Motu Traveller via Firewire as audio device.

The strange thing as that the device installs just fine and you can set it up in the Windows Sound Settings dialog, but it won't output any audio.

I have tried many different driver versions from Motu that did not cure the problem.

Using the Motu CueMix application (which is installed with the drivers) to see if the hardware works fine, I got the following message:

"The device is on a bus that cannot support this transfer rate"

Since the PC had Windows XP installed and SP3 this seemed to be related to the Firewire driver of Windows.

After installing an SP3 compatible driver from Allied Vision technologies (AVT 1394 Bus Driver package) the default Windows Driver was replaced and everything worked just fine:

http://www.alliedvisiontec.com/avt-products/software/avt-1394-bus-driver-package.html
http://www.alliedvisiontec.com

[florian]

Hello,

I have seen this issue with a variety of devices from MOTU on XP.

Here's a little background:

The reason that you get the message "The device is on a bus that cannot support this transfer rate" is because the MOTU drivers perform a quick 1394 (firewire) bus-speed diagnostic and determine that your firewire bus is slower than they expect.

From what I understand, the issue is the result of a design-limit implemented by Microsoft in their 1394 support stack for Windows XP (there might be some old Apple vs. PC politics involved, but Firewire support has always been weird science on PCs). The Allied Vision Tech patch is essentially a replacement driver that has the speed caps removed. It's really cool of them to release it for free and, I think it's definitely a required patch for working with Firewire on XP.

I have found that MOTU's USB support on XP actually provides a very stable playout environment. It's too bad that MOTU doesn't develop very clean XP drivers. They do not uninstall very cleanly and attempting to re-install them for troubleshooting can seriously impede the performance of MOTU devices with your hardware.