Multiface et Windows Vista

Citation : Greetings from RME!

This is the new HDSP series WDM streaming driver, equivalent to the current Fireface driver, offering additional features like WDM streaming, kernel streaming, 64 bit support and full Vista compatibility.

The current version is near release, stable and therefore in public beta test in the RME newsgroup forum. There are a few things you need to know before using this driver, so read carefully!

- The driver does not support MME, and will never do. If you need low latency MME for whatever reason, stay with the current driver. Note that all older MME software will work with the new drver, but will show more than 30 ms latency.

- The current release version of DIGICheck does not work with this driver. Download the special pre-release 4.5 from our website, or the latest beta with added record functionality as announced in our forum.


Installation
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Download the file

http://www.rme-audio.com/download/hdsp_wdm_beta19.zip

unzip it, start the included hdsp_fut.exe and update your hardware. Then switch off the computer. On next boot Windows will ask for new drivers, point to the directory where you unzipped them. The driver is version 3.0.


HDSP MADI Card:
Install the new driver, then flash the MADI card, cold reboot, then install the new driver again.



Notes on the driver
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The driver requires a new flash/firmware because of a completely new designed hardware. This new hardware combined with new driver routines offers these advantages:

- Lower system load on start of data transmission (start of record/playback)

- Better performance on playback. We added a small safety buffer of 32 samples on the playback side. To give some numbers from a typical test machine, crackling starts at:

Old driver 64 samples 60% 128 Samples 70%
New driver 64 samples 85% 128 Samples 90%

So even if you add the 32 samples to the 64 samples, the new driver still does a better job than the old one at 128! And the 32 samples are on the playback side only, so throughput monitoring is even more attractive. Because of this tremendous improvement we removed the highest buffer size and replaced it with a 32 sample setting as lowest setting.

- Secure Record Technique. This driver includes a new scheme for handling record data. It guarantees all record data to reach the application even when the computer is blocked with 100% CPU load for a short time. We think this is a real killer feature, as there is nothing more important than reliability when doing recordings.

Please post all bugs that you find in the RME Newsgroup. We will fix them as quickly as possible and upload new versions.