MOTU Traveler help

Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:01 pm

Hi everyone, I need some help getting my traveler working with my laptop. I've got a Toshiba Satellite with 1 gig ram and 1.83ghz Centrino Duo CPU running XP SP2. I bought a LaCie firewire pcmcia card with 2x fw 800 and 1x fw 400 ports using the texas instruments chipset that MOTU claim to support and get an error message saying that the device does not support the bus speed both on the 400 and 800 port. I was in touch with MOTU tech support and they recomended a Keyspan card but I can't find any mention of a keyspan firewire pcmcia card on their website and so sent them a message enquiring about it and have not received a responce from them and this was 12 days ago. Does anyone know of a pcmcia firewire card that works with the traveler? is any one using a traveler with a pc laptop? I've found a couple of cards using google that look like they have potential but I've already been burnt with the LaCie card and would like to know that the card does work with the traveler before I buy it. I'm currently look at http://www.firewiredirect.com/product/97/ can any one recommend it?

Thanks,
Retaw

Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 1:04 am

The problem that you're going to have, is the same one that I have and that is, the FireWire ports on PCM/CIA cards and the ones built into the laptops, cannot "bus power" a MOTU Traveler. The joke is on you! So forget about the built-in FireWire ports. The external PCM/CIA FireWire card must have the ability to include an external power supply that you will have to plug into the FireWire card along with the Traveler. You should purchase the power supply from the company that makes the card as opposed to an aftermarket device. If the external PCM/CIA FireWire cards does not offer an external power supply input, you can't use that card.

Contrary to the above, most of the laptops do provide bus powering on the USB 2.0 ports and there is no adapter to convert a FireWire device to USB.

HP dv8000 laptop user
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 3:01 am

Hi Remy, i'm using the power supply that came with the traveler to power it. Powering the Traveler is not the problem. everything installs fine and the laptop picks up the traveler no problem but when I try to use the CueMix console or use the travelers asio drivers in cubase I get an error message saying that the device is on a bus that cannot support the speed or something along those lines.

Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 5:20 pm

Some laptop makers cut corners licence the an older version of the iLink technology from Sony, it only supports a subset of the IEEE1394 spec.

Also to work properly the MOTU recommends firewire cards with the Texas Instruments chip set.

Check your specs to make sure that it supports the full firewire bandwidth.

Cool

Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 5:35 pm

gdoubleyou wrote:

Some laptop makers cut corners licence the an older version of the iLink technology from Sony, it only supports a subset of the IEEE1394 spec.

I could understand that being a problem if I was using the firewire ports on the laptop. Does it also affect me if im using a pcmcia fw card too?

gdoubleyou wrote:

Also to work properly the MOTU recommends firewire cards with the Texas Instruments chip set.

Bothe the LaCie card and the firewire ports on my lappy are using the TI chipset.

gdoubleyou wrote:

Check your specs to make sure that it supports the full firewire bandwidth.

How would I test that my laptop supports the full firewire bandwidth?

This topic sponsored by: