Line6's Poor Windows 7 Support
Line6 is a company that does make some really great guitar hardware. I've owned a Line6 Spider III 75 modelling amp that is really good fun and I recently purchased an M13 Stompbox Modeller. The M13 is an amazing piece of kit and I'll be reviewing that at a later date, but it could be the last time Line6 gets any of my money.
The reason? The company's really awful Windows 7 support. A few months ago I purchased a Line6 UX1 USB interface. This clever bit of kit allows me to record guitar and mic on my PC with next to no latency and monitor in realtime. It really is a fabulous little device and comes feature packed with Line6's famous amp modelling tones.
Until recently the UX1 worked flawlessly. And then I updated to Windows 7.
Windows 7 clearly has come as something of a surprise to Line6. After all it's not as if there's been any publicity about it. The company has issued a beta Win7 driver for the Ux1 but as far as I can tell it seems to make no difference whether I use this driver or the previous Vista one.
The previously brilliant UX1 is rendered useless now due to poor driver support from Line6. When trying to use the device with a DAW such as Reaper or Cubase the UX1 will regularly emit ear-piercing white noise spikes which make using headphones hazardous and speakers plain nasty. It's random and horrible and makes recording anything a nightmare.
Line6 has set up a beta discussion forum which is full of people with the same problem and very little feedback at this point from Line6 itself. It's gone awful quiet over there from the company. Now one might have expected these kind of driver issues while Windows 7 was still in beta, but the OS has been available at retail for several months now and still Line6 can't make the UX1 or UX2 work properly with it. The lack of communication on the issue makes matters even worse.
So until Line6 actually bothers to fix its drivers I'd recommend against buying any of its USB recording interfaces.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Harry on 14/12/09 at 12:33 . Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. |
10/01/10 @ 02:25
It's not just the UX1, and not just the white noise spikes. My PodXT works just fine as far as sound goes- it just randomly bluescreens the computer every few hours.
Tuxguitar + the POD is about the greatest practice toolset ever, but it's driving me up the freaking wall.
29/01/10 @ 00:21
Yes it does suck! I have Windows 7 64 bit and am still waiting for line 6 to get software that works right. I have a Pod Live xt that I now have to edit with an old laptop running windows XP Pro.I have found that NI Guitar rig 4 works like a dream!! with window 7 for recording with Sonar 8.5. I will keep waiting but ye Line 6 will NOT gat anymore of my money.
Rik
12/05/10 @ 14:10
Totally, their line 6 monkey don't work on windows 7, you can't update and it won't detect your line 6 devices. Worse thing is, their community don't even care to help you. What a downer from a brand i trusted for years
12/05/10 @ 14:12
You comment is rather out of date John. Windows 7 drivers have been released and I've had absolutely no problems running Monkey, PODFarm or PODFarm 2.0 on my Win 7 x64 machine since their release.
Line 6 was very slow in getting Windows 7 drivers and support out, but these programs work fine now.
And PODFarm 2.0 is rather splendid.
12/05/10 @ 15:19
I read this post via the twitter feed. It was interesting to see both sides of the what will be an ongoing story.
06/06/10 @ 11:54
Actually I have a Win7 x64 computer (a Samsung R780) that does NOT work with the Pod Studio UX1. All the problems are still there: noise spikes, quits working, etc.
06/06/10 @ 18:39
Interesting. I did have a slight issue myself when the Win 7 drivers first came along. I'll explain how I fixed it.
What else have you got running on that IRQ? My PC was running both graphics cards and various other peripherals too. The graphics cards were running in SLI and it was this that was seemingly chocking up the bandwidth needed by the UX1.
When I disabled SLI all the problems went away. And of course it matter of moments to re-enable SLI when I want to run a game.
If you've not got an SLI rig, you could try a similar fix. Go into the device manager and disable your graphics card. It will still run, but only in basic form (which is fine for running your DAW and other music software), that also fixes the issue.
Hope either of these help for your system.