Sound Card with stable drivers for Reaktor?

Yes, I know that I was less than happy with Reaktor awhile ago, and stated that I was getting close to sailing it into the lake by which I lived. Turns out that it's my EMU 1212m's drivers that have been causing the problem. Almost 2 YEARS, and they still don't have decent drivers, (I have the "latest" versions). I finally installed ASIO4ALL on my system and guess what? All the problems gone. No more Reaktor's audio not initializing. No crackly sound. No more screwly plugin behaviors. BETTER SOUND! No more samplerate probs. Everything works fine. It does cost me a 5 to 10 percent increase in cpu usage, however. It's worth every cycle.

Question is this. Could someone tell me of a good card, not at all affiliated with creativelabs, that they are running Reaktor solidly with? I would like to use native drivers versus third party, although after my experience with EMU, I'm starting to feel pretty good about third party solutions

The EMU card? GREAT hardware. TERRIBLE drivers.

 

I've been using an Echo Mia PCI audio card since they came out years and years ago. Never had a single problem with it. . .I have a friend who got one close to the same time and his is still going strong after all these years too. We're both on Windows XP, but there are OSX drivers as well.

You're only going to be able to get down to 11ms of latency though (without crackling). . which is theoretically below the limits of human perception, but still higher than what newer cards can get down to.

just my 2 cents,

wh

 

the internal soundcard on my Mac.

;-)

sowari

 

As long as it's not a G4. . .

 

HUFF! Oh, it says that I must have a message over 10 characters, so once more I say.....HUFF!

Zoe

 

ive had success with my m-=audio 410 interface - its firewire. that said, ive heard and seen nothing but bad with their lower budget boxes, like the mobilepre. i did the same thing with ASIO4ALL with my mobilepre.

one question - are you using ASIO4ALL with the EMU card? if so, why dont you stick with that?

 

It's really a question of how much you want to spend. There are plenty of options. On the high end I'd look at RME. On the lower end there are many to choose from.

I had a 1212 for a while too and had similar problems. Great hardware, crap drivers.

 

Truthfully, I might very well do that. I'm going to be doing a comp upgrade down the road, so the increased cpu usage will be less of an issue. That's the only downside. Because ASIO4ALL runs "over" a WDM driver, it's more cpu hungry. Still it's not a critical issue for me as I'm running an Athlon XP 2800+. FMDual ran at about 41% on my old drivers. With ASIO4ALL, it runs at about 45 to 47%. Still, like I said, it's worth it considering what got cleared up. It is true, the hardware of the EMU card is great. To anyone considering buying one, I would say update to their latest drivers, (their early WDM only ran at 48k, the latest runs up to 192, of course very few persons would use that high a samplerate with Reaktor), and IMMEDIATELY install ASIO4ALL. Creativelabs can't write a good driver for love or money. They've had two long years. Long enough for me. ASIO4ALL, on the other hand, has been consistently excellent. It's not the first time I've used it to clear up driver probs....

Zoe

 

I've been using a Terratec EWX 24/96 for five years. Some people slag Terratec (especially the 6Fire's breakout box creating noise issues- but I don't think that's sold anymore), but I've had great results with mine. YMMV, of course...

ew

 

I have been using an Audiophile 24/96 for years now with no problems. And they are really cheap now and still sound great to me.

 

I too am looking at perhaps going to another card. Mostly I've been looking at either a lower end Echo card - not the Firewire boxes, but the Gina or Layla 3G, or possibly the Presonus non-rackmount unit (I think it's the Firebox?).
Echo has specs at www.echoaudio.com in Adobe Acrobat for their equipment, but I haven't been able to determine from the specs if the "virtual outs" on their MiaMIDI card are duplicated in some way on the newer Gina/Layla interfaces. Presonus also has an Acrobat file on their interface (no URL, sorry).
I've heard good things about all three of these (mostly from the Cakewalk website and consumer sites), but it would be interesting to hear some Reaktor users weigh in on this topic.
Knowing what I now know I'd stay away from anything associated with Creative Labs (including E-Mu).

 

It is my understanding that the virtual outs on the Mia series of cards (which, as I said above, I've been very satisfied with) was to make up for the fact that the Mia only had one set of hardware analog ouputs. Both the Gina and Layla series have 8 hardware outputs, so there is no need for "virtual" outputs.

-wh

 

Hello. I have been using Echo Mona24, Layla24, and Indigo I/O with my Laptop (P4/3GHz). They do seem to run fairly well, but I don't have another sound card to compare them too. I use Reaktor mostly standalone. Once I get up to 60% cpu usage, I get a lot of spikes and Reaktor shuts audio processing off. Whether this is an issue with Echo's drivers, Reaktor, my Laptop, XP, or any combination thereof, I do not know.
BTW, Echo released version 6.11 of their drivers for Layla24 and Mona24 on 10/27/04. After well over a year, it is still listed as BETA.
Marc

 

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend the Layla, Gia, Mona 20 and 24 bit offerings for that reason, they aren't updating the drivers. I KNOW that the (now discontinued) MIA has great stable drivers for XP (the last non-beta driver works flawlessly for me under XP sp2), and for the modest $$ one can get one off of ebay. .the modest MIA is a pretty good deal. Beyond the MIA I've heard mixed results from folks about the "beta" drivers for Layla, Mona, and GIA 20 and 24 bit.

[wh]

 

Thanks, weeklyhaircut and RandomLFO, for contributing!

Some notes -

In response to weeklyhaircut's comment about the outputs on the Echo interfaces, I suspect you're right about why the "virtual outputs" were included in the Echo Mia MIDI. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I know of at least three cards now where the output channel drivers don't match the physical outputs at all- so the virtual output/physical output correlation isn't *necessarily* a given (I know, it sounds weird, but it happens!).

I didn't know those items about the Echo drivers (in beta, possibly causing fluctuations in CPU usage) - these were very surprising to me given what I've seen/read so far online about Echo (on vendors' and Cakewalk's site, plus reviews). I really appreciate the candor.

I was also surprised to hear so many good things about ASIO4ALL as I'd been warned away from 3rd party ASIO drivers - probably some article - and also because I recall I'd heard there were some latency issues with ASIO4ALL (by way of context, I use ASIO at 10 ms latency, and find this acceptable). Not to rubbish ASIO4ALL unnecessarily - just something to look into if you're planning on going that route. I guess ymmv.

I'd still be interested in knowing if anyone has had any experiences with the new generation Echo cards, though -it would be valuable to see if the new versions of the Gina and Layla are an improvement over the older ones. I'm also still curious about Presonus (Firebox?) and the new Audiotrak interface (Maya), if anyone here has worked with either of these.

 

interesting, thanks for the info. . . . I'm curious as to why one would want/need extra virtual outputs on a card with 8 physical outputs.. . the output of the virtual outs is just being mixed into one of the physical outs anyway, right?

-wh

 

I normally run ASIO4ALL at 10ms and have taken the latency down to 5ms with no problems, although that probably does relate to the stability of the WDM driver that it runs over. I find that I like to run at 10ms. It's comfortable, and never causes probs....

zoe

 

I think this looks like an awesome deal:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-2-0-5-1-C...843562993QQcategoryZ67869QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

;-)

Seriously though, I'm using a Delta 44. It's basic, but it works well! I'm currently on a latency of 1024 samples at 44.1/48 khz. Plenty of headroom for prevention of audio artifacts. I'm also running this on XPSP2, with an Athalon 2600 proc. The CPU can be going to 95% (with the graphics going crazily slow) and the audio doesn't usually glitch. The only annoying thing about it is that there is no multi-client ASIO driver, but if you are smart you can get around it by using different ASIO drivers for each open application. Dirty, but it gets the job done. The Cubase Multimedia ASIO driver seems to be a pile of poo though.

 

motu 896

rocksolid !

 

I'm sure that MOTU interfaces on MACs will be fine, but be careful if you are using a PC with a MOTU interface. I had a 2408 on my desktop. Although it didn't have any problems with Reaktor, It didn't work with some of my other software - SoundForge, AcidPro, ... Obviously many on PC don't use these products, and the newer MOTU drivers may well have solved this, but I thought that it should be mentioned.
Marc