Turtlerock Forum

For some time now I have been setting up my 'old school' home studio. I have two Ta@#$% M3500, a 24/8/2 channel desk going to a Fostex G24s, a Scully 280 and an Otari MX7000. That was the easy bit, works like a charm. However, I decided it would be good to have digital system as well, so I have the other M3500, this time a 32 channel, really a 24 channel with 8 additional stereo inputs. I have a MOTU 24IO, with the 424 PCIe card, which I (foolishly) though I could just set up in a Win 7 PC, and run Reaper, to give me 24 channels of digital. The sad story is that, even after more than a week of conversations with the MOTU tech support guy, I cannot get this to work. In fact, with the MOTU 424 in the PCI slot, the PC sometimes freezes during boot up, or sometimes it freezes when I try to set up the MOTU configuration, and even if I can get it up and running there is no signal from the 24IO to Reaper. If I disconnect all of the MOTU gear and connect 1 channel in via the PC built in sound card and out via the headphone socket, Reaper and everything else works fine. Is there anyone here who has, or had, this sort of system, MOTU 24IO, Reaper on a PC, that could help, or should I look at a totally different approach to recording from my M3500. I have wasted too many hours on this already. However, I have been contacted by someone who has had almost the exact same system running for years, rock solid, so I guess there's hope. Any, genuine, assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Hey Bob

Gearslutz has some threads on this ...

the last motu windows audio drivers that support the 24io are from january 2014! they also just support up to windows 8.1 and there is no official conformation that these drivers will work under windows 10. so you maybe have to install your windows 10 parallel to your old windows installation to have the opportunity to go back if the drivers won´t work..

but also ...

I just upgraded myself from 8.1. I had problems (showing in reaper but not in general playback devices) but once I just uninstalled the current drivers (motu hardware under programs and features) and reinstalled (after a restart) the latest motu drivers everything worked perfectly.

and

Great Motu old PCI 424 card fully compatible with Windows 10 Pro 64 bit

It does sound like a driver issue from your description, but then again everything that goes wrong on a PC sounds like a driver issue to us Mac heads.

Thanks for the reply, however, the solution was simple. After I spent ten days bashing my head against the wall with this thing, sending heaps of messages to Reaper and MOTU tech support, and even phoning MOTU in the US in the middle of the night. I spoke to my local computer tech, who knows nothing about audio, but said he could check the computer for me. So off I went, set up the entire system in his workshop, and as usual it froze. He removed the PCI card, stuck it in a new computer (running Win10) and bingo, everything worked. So, I now have a new computer, which we think would cost less than the labour would have cost me to sort out the old one, and it has all the new bells and whistles.

Lesson, never ignore the obvious.