Some more updating to fill in puzzle pieces.

I put the computer together a few weeks ago. It has a 3.2gh Intel dual core, with 2gb of DDR2 RAM. It uses standard VGA drivers for video as I am using onboard video in lieu of a video card. 16mb or RAM dedicated to video. Also no NIC, thus no NIC drivers, and no interrupts of the the CPU for internet access or polling email. The only card on the mobo is the MOTU PCIx card.

The hard drive has Windows, the MOTU drivers, Real Band, and nothing else. No anti virus program or spyware program, as it will never go on the internet. There is a screen saver enabled, but no power saving. And just for the record, I have 6 PCs in my house and the only time any of them get powered off is when the neighborhood power goes out. They all run 24/7, without issue.

Now, someone mentioned "seeing" the MOTUs. The interface works fine. The audio port setting panel sees all 8 interfaces on both of the MOTUs. I have tested all 16 outputs with a short test song I wrote with an 8 bar section put on 16 channels of Real Band. Track one is bar 1-8, track 2 is bar 9-16, and so forth. Track one and two are set to outputs 1 and 2, with track one panned hard left and track 2 panned hard right. That follows through for all 16 tracks. As I play the song through, I see the channel one light on MOTU 1 flash for 8 bars. Then track 2. Then 3, and so on. When it gets to track 9 in Real Band, it switches to the second MOTU, and does the same thing with outputs 9-16 as it did with outputs 1-8. I ran that test many times. It responded that way (correctly) every time.

Then I tried the ASIO drivers. 15 outputs were fine. The very first track, which was routed to MOTU unit 1 and panned hard left, was overdriven to the point where I feared it would blow a speaker. I then switched routing so that track was not on MOTU unit 1 output 1 (though still in track 1 position in the Real Band song) and the overdriving followed the track. I then tried the ASIO4ALL and the result was exactly the same. So that means that whatever is in track 1 was being overdriven with any ASIO driver. But that is no big deal. I have never gotten the ASIO drivers to work before and didn't care then so I don't care now. (Now from that paragraph, remember mainly that Real Band saw all 16 outputs on the 2 MOTUs.)

Now on to the night I went ballistic. Actually the night before. I went upstairs, loaded Real Band, worked for 5-6 hours. Successfully. Mixing everything on my Mackie, recording it off in stereo to another computer running Adobe Audition using the original M-Audio interface I used to use. All is well. It got to be about 1am, and I had to get up for work at 6:45, so I called it a night.

(Pause here to note that I did not suddenly get the urge to dismantle and reassemble a running system. I didn't download new drivers, I didn't change Real Band's audio port configuration, I didn't run Windows updates, I didn't scan for virus.... I just walked down 12 steps, took a right, let the dog out, and went to bed. The only thing I even touched upstairs was turning off the 2 powered Wharfedale monitors, which of course has zero to do with the computers.)

The next day I went upstairs, nudged the mouse, turned the monitors back on and hit play. And I got a memory exception error. Okay. Only strike one. Cleared the error, which made the transports in Real Band non-responsive. I went through the task manager and shut down Real Band. I rebooted the computer. When I started Real Band back up, Real Band had lost my MOTU configuration so I had to reconfigure it all. Working from a cell phone photo I had to the prefs screens, I set it up exactly like it was when it worked. I loaded my sample song, not even the song I was mixing, but that 16 track x 8 bar testing track that I used to successfully test. I hit play. I got a memory exception. I did the same things again. 7 times I did that before I stopped and decided whether I would get the original hard drive that has BIAB/RB on it and throw the thing through the drywall or not.

I come back to the same question, spoken from the computer geek side of the equation. If there is an issue with my setup, doesn't logic say that the original setup would NEVER have worked? And from a geek perspective, "something" does not exist in my world. There is no "something changed". Short of someone breaking into my house and sneaking up there to make changes to my system, nothing changed. "Something" doesn't change by itself. Changes have to be made by someone. And while I MAY accept that Windows updates can at times cause problems, those updates would have to come down through a network connection. This computer does not have a network connection.

And that sums up where the frustration comes from. Had it never worked, I would surrender and say that it just isn't going to work out. However, I was mixing down the 4th song of this project, on the 5th day of use, when it started giving me errors. Does it not follow logic that if I had a setup issue it would have surfaced on day one, song one?

My issues are two. Why I suddenly started getting a memory exception, and where the latency suddenly came from (on day 5) that is causing the playback to stutter when nothing else in being done on the computer, meaning no mouse movement, no keyboard activity, no internet activity, no anti virus running in the background suddenly kicking in to start a scan.....

My trumpet player with his Mac G5 runs three of the same MOTU units with Protools and spent an hour on the phone scratching his head with me because he has no issues at all, and his G5 runs at 700mh. I am at 3.2gh. I am totally baffled.