MOTUNATION (formerly UnicorNation) is an independent community for discussing Digital Performer and other MOTU audio software and hardware. It is not affiliated with MOTU.
Hi peeps ,
I'm currently using an apple mac G4 400 mhz, cubase VST 5.1 and a MOTU 2408 MkII.
i'm planning to move up to SX and get a friend to build me a PC running Windows XP with an AMD dual core processor and an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard.
Please could you help by answering any of these questions:
1. What is the difference between a 324 and a 424 PCI Card?
2. What is the difference between PCI, PCI-e and PCI-X are there any benefits of using one over any other?
3. I'm based in the UK, How would I upgrade to a 424 card and how much does it cost?
4. What is the difference between a 2408 MkII and the Mk III and what are the benefits of upgrading to MKIII?
5. My friends building me a PC and planning to use an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard with an AMD dual core processor, if i do go this route on reading this http://www.motu.com/techsupport/technot ... 6038155973 it looks as though my current 324 card won't work with this PC, so if I upgrade to 424 PCI Card do you know if it should defiantly work with a Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard with an AMD dual core processor?
6. I think I've registered my 2408 MkII on http://www.motu.com/techsupport/register/index.html but i'm not sure as i received no confirmation email or gained access to a new control panel or even a your registration was successful screen or anything, how can I find out if it has worked please?
My suggestion is to stay with the Mac. I fought like hell to get my MOTU interface to work properly with a PC. Not that it's necessarily MOTU's fault, but windows doesn't handle the workload very well.
I have a MOTU 2048 mk2 and I am using Cool Edit Pro as my recording interface. I put 2 gigs of ram in it a my cool edit will still crash citing some crap windows error.
Also, It was difficult to find the driver on the MOTU site for the older hardware, and was more difficult to get my PC to figure it out. (something like 10 restarts later, I had already given up and it just started working out of left field)
Also, when I came to this board to ask how to get it working, 100% of the responces were "buy a mac".
I am currently looking into refurbished g5's so I can maybe get a less expensive mac that I will strictly use for recording. I'm typically all for using PC's for everything, but in this case I have to warn you that it'll be frustrating as hell.
You probably want to post to the Steinberg hardware forums for that. There were, and are, a bunch of MOTU PCI rigs in there. 424 is where the whole hardware cuemix thing started, so with the 324, I guess you'll be using the DAW for monitoring (latency a bit higher), or you can just go with direct cues from whatever your sources are. The 424 should also be more compatible motherboard-wise, but you may find recommendations for boards others have run 324's on. I'm not sure how much code was shared between the latest 424 and 324 drivers or software, but there may be some fixes unique to the 424. It has done pretty well by me, with a single 2408mk3, and I can't recall any bad reports from the Nuendo people, and some have some pretty big interface setups hanging off it, and have it sharing a board with many other cards (I've got two UAD's myself). From what I have read, I don't think the PCI based MOTU's are deserving of the same "MOTU on Windows" rep that some of the others get. Just do a bit of research on the motherboard and you should be fine. Try to find a good "example" poster who seems to know his rig and has been on the forum a while.
I personally have never felt the need to run a "cutting edge" host. A few years back, it got to the point where just about anything relatively current was way fast enough for what I was doing. I also usually prefer to freeze, bounce, subgroup, etc., and create subsequent session files for easier mixing, but if you did mostly all-at-once mixing with lots of effects or VSTi's, you may need that power. My studio machine now is only an ASUS A7N8X-e Deluxe with a 2500 AMD chip 500Megs, and separate OS and audio drives. The last was similar, but with an 1800 on an ECS board (I'm on that at home now). They both did fine with the 424. Neither of those combo's should cost much over a hundred bucks now, and anything even from back then would smoke the s*** out of a G4/400. All of the MOTU cards AFAIK are just regular 33MHz PCI slots (unless the 424/G5 is 66), and you can probably find PC boards with just about any slot config you need, regardless of what level CPU or chipset you end up going with. I'm also not sure what the 324 upgrade might cost or be worth. The 424 to 424/G5 price was OK, but I didn't need it. If I already had a 324/MKII setup, I might keep it and just go with software monitoring (I've been using that anyway), or cues from the board. I've heard the converters from mk2 to mk3 have been enhanced, but it's probably not the night and day difference people describe going from mk1 to either of them. You can probably add a lightpipe box to a mk2 and get 8 comparable quality inputs, and have the 8 on the MOTU box as extras.
Good Luck!
George
PS- I literally *do not* crash here. I was always OK in 98SE too, but I may have been lucky. I'm on XPPro SP1 with the ASUS. Closest thing I've seen was a once in a while bluescreen-type XP message on shutdown, which was a known UAD bug (no longer a problem). It would hit right when the machine got to the last step where it turns off, so it was basically done (no scandisk crap on boot), but I had to turn it off manually.
, 