PreSonus Forums

Just a short update. Two quotes from yesterday:

1) http://answers.presonus.com/17207/meter-latency-issues-with-new-rml-32
"There is a known issue with UC and FireWire connected mixers seeing laggy metering. Check the UC release notes. We are working on this issue currently. No ETA on fix release date." (Michael Martin, May 23, 2017)

2) "Control and metering on UC Surface instance connected via Firewire may exhibit lag on some systems" (Universal Control 2.1 Milestone Release Notes, May 23, 2017)

So what do we do if we want to record ?

1) Connect firewire and live with the lag and record ?
2) connect also with a network cable or via wifi for control ? I've had instances where the mixer shows twice !
3) invest in Dante and the road stops there ?

Cheers

gbam55 wroteSo what do we do if we want to record ?

1) Connect firewire and live with the lag and record ?
2) connect also with a network cable or via wifi for control ? I've had instances where the mixer shows twice !
3) invest in Dante and the road stops there ?

Cheers

What daw are you using> The FW lag only affects metering, not recording, so you can use the metering in the daw. If you use Studio One, there is no need for UC at all, as all the controls are in Studio One for the mixer.

If you do have 2 connections, the mixer will show up 2x's in UC. Also, if you remote into the computer, you will see the mixer 2x's, which is a windows thing. You can have the mixer connected via fw and ethernet, and use the ethernet for control if needed.

Thank you very much for your reply and confirmation from f the situation.

Btw, if I had a Dante card installed could I record via firewire in addition to sending the audio via the Dante network ?

I'm looking at options and the CS18 looks good but is expensive and the AVB is broke. What are the pros/cons of Dante with CS18ai (0r any competitive) controller ?

Thanks for any feedback
Cheers

I'm using Capture when I can or Studio One pro.
Thanks

gbam55 wroteThank you very much for your reply and confirmation from f the situation.

Btw, if I had a Dante card installed could I record via firewire in addition to sending the audio via the Dante network ?

I'm looking at options and the CS18 looks good but is expensive and the AVB is broke. What are the pros/cons of Dante with CS18ai (0r any competitive) controller ?

Thanks for any feedback
Cheers

The Dante card replaces the FW card, so its an either or proposition. One potential downside to Dante that wasn't mentioned is sample rate. Dante is limited to 48.0.

As far as the CS18, I use that in conjunction with the RM in the studio, and its a really cool combo. You can bounce between the mixer control and daw control with one button. 3rd party plugs map pretty well (the ones I use anyway), and its pretty easy to bounce between bus view/control, fx, sends, inserts, etc. Its strictly control in the daw, no audio, but I don't need more because the mixer passes the audio. Introducing Dante into this wouldn't change much in terms of functionality.

One thing I don't know, is how you use the mixer. Are you mostly studio, mostly live, or combo?

matthewgorman wroteThe Dante card replaces the FW card, so its an either or proposition.

That's not true, all the option cards have S/PDif and a dual FW800 interface. The input signal is sent out of both FW and Dante simultaneously by default.


If you have Dante, the only function that absolutely requires FireWire is SMAART. Everything else can be done with Dante.

gbam55 wroteSo what do we do if we want to record ?

1) Connect firewire and live with the lag and record ?
2) connect also with a network cable or via wifi for control ? I've had instances where the mixer shows twice !
3) invest in Dante and the road stops there ?

Cheers

What you do is you use UC Surface 1.8.0 on the FireWire computer along with Capture and you won't see any kind of lag on any of the software. Then you can use UC Surface 2.x on an iPad if you want the new features there. At that point, just wait, eventually Presonus will have that issue fixed and you can then update the FireWire computer to UC 2.x, but until then just use the 1.8.0 version as it works just fine with the latest Firmware.

No need to worry about Daunte unless there is another real reason you need Daunte such as connecting to other Daunte devices or have a remote computer you want to record to over Ethernet. Upgrading to Daunte just to fix the FireWire lag issues seems WAY over the top to me, just use the previous version that works and all good, no money needs to be spent.

Steve

Karyn wrote

matthewgorman wroteThe Dante card replaces the FW card, so its an either or proposition.

That's not true, all the option cards have S/PDif and a dual FW800 interface. The input signal is sent out of both FW and Dante simultaneously by default.


If you have Dante, the only function that absolutely requires FireWire is SMAART. Everything else can be done with Dante.

Thanks for the clarification Karyn.

Well, I updated my RM Firmware and to UC 2.1 on my Windows 8.1 machine using a TI chip FireWire 400 and I don't seem to have an unusable lag as described above. At least at first glance. I did have to go into the Device manager and update my Texas Instruments 1394 device driver, but until I did that UC 2.1 would not even connect to my mixer over FW only network. I'll report back after my gig this Saturday when I can really get a lot of pressure on and know for sure how well it does. Until then I may run a multi track recording back through the mixer tonight and try mixing a good 16-20 channel show to give it a little workout.

But last night, with just a mic and a stereo send from Virtual DJ over FireWire to 29/30, the faders and spectrometers and meters were OK for me. Phew! I'll be sure to download UC 1.8.0 just in case I need it, and I have the iPad app for a backup mixer too (actually 2 of them, an iPad 2 and iPad Air 2)

For those of you who are having problems, is it happening right away? Or is it an issue that creeps in over time?

Steve

sjc193 wroteFor those of you who are having problems, is it happening right away? Or is it an issue that creeps in over time?
Steve

I can answer my own question here. After doing more testing, I do get the lag, it creeps in over time.

The more moves you make it eventually starts to have a hard time keeping up and the app starts to stutter.

Definitely a case of Deja Vu, this is exactly what I noticed in UCS 1.3 before it was fixed in UCS 1.5.

Back to 1.8.0 I will fall for now. . .

Steve

I am very sorry to read about your experience with UC 2.x, Steve. Hopefully UC 1.8 works for you. Smaart RTA and Spectra are ok with UC 1.8, so don't worry.

"Firewire may exhibit lag on some systems" (May 23, 2017)

It seems that we will have to live longer with this problem, simply because the reason for the problem can not be found. It happens - or happens not - on PCs and Macs equally and the amount/intensity of lag is varying. The recommendation from PreSonus Software is to roll back to a UC version, which works (UC 1.8.0). UC Surface 2.0 was released on February 21, 2017, just to keep this in mind.

My intention with this thread is to give the developers hints for their search for something, which seems to be an phantom. I have no doubt that they are continuously looking into this problem, but searching for something inconcrete seldom leads to useful results. Obviously we need more "stories" telling about the lag and/or successful installations of UC 2.x. Or is nobody using FireWire anymore...?

Thanks Wahler, but I was expecting issues as this has been mentioned enough on the forum that didn't expect it not to have issues. I was just surprised at first when everything seemed to work, but I should have known that I should test a full band before speaking/typing that it was great.

In many ways it is great, the smoothness of the faders gets me excited, now I want the lag issue solved even more! Cause UC 2 as a GUI is really sweet! So many things we asked for are in there.

Here's the thing, now that I've tested this, I don't know about anyone else, but I am having the exact same behavior that I had back in 2015. Below is a thread that I chimed in on, back then we didn't call it a lag, but we were saying that the faders were moving on their own. Eventually someone realized that they (the faders) were repeating moves that were made earlier or even on a different device possibly. The post below proves that I had mentioned this before many Firmware and software updates ago. . . there is another post in 2016 (maybe late 2015) where I'm all excited because it was fixed when UC 1.5 came out and I updated. I made no other changes to my configuration.

True some of the posts in the thread may be referring to different issues about more than 3 devices, but I can tell a few of the folks were seeing the same thing I was. The first post describes the same problem I have, it's like meters are moving and all is good, then they just stop and lose connection for a brief second, then comes back, I'm seeing this on UC 2.1.

viewtopic.php?f=222&t=12406&p=68748&hilit=faders+move+own#p68748

I can guarantee these are related in one way or another and there are other posts about the "faders moving on their own" back in 2015 too I'm sure. I should probably make a movie of the issue and send it to support, it truly is hard to explain until you see it happen for yourself, the faders just get all squirrely and start moving around wildly, not all of them at once, but different ones here and there, it's scary to see when mixing a live band that's for sure. . .

Steve

Edit: Here's another really similar post about squirrely faders over firewire

viewtopic.php?f=222&t=10409&p=56429&hilit=faders+squirrely+RM#p56429

I tried to get PreSonus Software interested in your post, but I was told that PreSonus Support is the right and the only place for questions about FireWire problems. We are asked to open support tickets. Would you be ready for that, Steve? Or anybody else?

Hardy

Yup, I'll be making a ticket soon. I have a festival this weekend after a big gig Tuesday too though so I may wait a week. I fell back to UCS 1.8.0 for last nights bar gig, it worked as expected, correctly. Nice that you don't have to change firmware to go back and forth.

Steve

I read something interesting in this post in the Studio One forum (german section, July 1, 2017):

https://forums.presonus.com/viewtopic.php?p=145152#p145152

Translated and completed the post says: "(Studio One, Studio One Remote for Android,) iPad Remote, Windows Tablet Remote, UC Surface, remote control of the rack mixers and the monitoring app Q-Mix - all this is developed by the team in Hamburg (Germany). Also the recording software Capture."

I do understand that PreSonus Software in Hamburg does not want to be available for customers questions (the only exception is Studio One), so support in Baton Rouge is the place to contact. But still the question is, WHERE the FireWire lag can be solved. Is it a firmware problem (Baton Rouge) or a software problem (Hamburg)? Hamburg is "looking into it", so it must be a software (UC 2.x) related problem.

Are there more stories, that can help PreSonus Support to "understand" the problem and make the guys in Hamburg find a solution...?

http://answers.presonus.com/18743/latence-importante-en-firewire-800

Here is another story of the famous FireWire Lag, which just got translated into english (the original post of July 2 was written in french). I quote one parapragh: "Everything worked perfectly but since qq time, I have a huge latency between the time I send a sound in a microphone that is connected to the table and the moment when I see, in Universal Control, the meter of the track in To move. The sound has no latency, if I send a sound in a microphone, I hear it immediately in the speakers or the headphones, it is only the wave in the meter of the track that is in ******. So it's very hard to set the winnings with a half second of ****** and one shot in two that is taken into account."

Let's see what the answer of PreSonus will be.

I'll just chime in that I did move into UCS 1.8 on my PC.

Before doing the original update I actually had a case where my monitor mixes stopped outputting here and there (meters did not respond either), after the update I did a gig on a Tuesday before the big festival and I got the same issue on the drum monitor, it never worked all night (7 acts), that's after I fell back to UCS 1.8. So the day before the festival I performed a factory reset on the mixer, changing nothing on the computer or iPads. It seemed to fix that problem. . .

I ran sound for 20 different acts last weekend including folks from Rusted Root and Donna the Buffalo, everything worked as well as it has for the last year so that's GOOD! This weekend I have two gigs lined up for Tim Reynolds TR3 (Dave Matthews lead guitar player), really looking forward to it, but sure wish I could be running UCS 2.x on my PC . . .

Steve

30 days later there is a response (http://answers.presonus.com/18743/latence-importante-en-firewire-800):

"answered Jul 31 by Michael Martin (42,300 points)
Best answer
We are aware of an issue with Meter Lag and FireWire connection (It's listed in the Release Notes). We are working on a solution currently."

Again he said "currently", like in a previous answer. UC Control 2.0 was released on February 21, 2017 and it said in the Relase Notes: "Control and metering for mixers connected over firewire is too slow".

Thanks for the update