Reply to USB3 / Native Instruments S4, Audio 4, Audio 8, Audio 2 - NI forum

Recently NI found a way to fix the USB3 problem under OSX, I can't comment on that as I don't use USB3 on my mac.

However Freshfluke (you may remember her from such failures as the VMS4) has suggested the same can be done for the rest of their users i.e the PC users.

She says to "just install the USB2 driver after uninstalling the USB3 driver", anyone who knows anything about PC's knows this is a stupid statement in itself, but she's saying it anyway.

After I told her it's just not that simple on a PC, they got pretty stroppy, deleted my comments and locked the thread.

They went on to blame Dell (in his case it was a Dell user), now I am getting pretty tired of NI blaming anyone else and not accepting the fact that they now face a serious limitation with the flagship product that being the S4.

They no longer sell/support the Audio 8 (a big surprise to me) and I guess the Audio4 will join it, but it leaves the S4 unable to use almost all the modern laptops being released today.

They say that the A6 and A10 work, but we know that as they use a different design based on a different chipset and it's of little importance to those of us with S4's.


Firstly I'd like to say to anyone trying their suggestion of deleting the USB3 driver and replacing it with a USB2 generic driver will never work, even if you were to, rebooting would find the USB3 host again and you are back to the start again. WINDOWS IS NOT OSX!

If you were able to find the registry key for the host, you still couldn't hack this to make it a USB2 port, this can only be done in firmware or at BIOS level. Now considering all the different manufactures and all their variations of chipset this would be an insurmountable task to make firmware for every variation, and after talking to NEC and Dell it's never going to happen.


So if you read they have a workaround /fix, ignore it, you could really mess up your PC especially if you have no knowledge of PC hardware maintenance.


It's seems all they do is repeat what someone has said to them and them call it Gospel (unfortunately a sign of the times), this is not only stupid, it's dangerous ...if you can't prove it for yourself, don't spread the BS .....

I asked them to show me where to find such a driver .......nothing
I asked them to give me screenshots of a working solution .......nothing

I can't understand why someone with absolutely no knowledge of PC's can even be allowed to make such suggestions (and it's not the first time they(she) has got it very very wrong).


Now onto a solution, the only sure fire way to make the S4 work is to not use USB3 ...simple, but that means you can't upgrade to many of the new PC laptops, unless they have a USB2 port or eSata/USB2 combo port.


I suspect it's more than a driver issue, I believe it's the way Traktor talks to the driver, as the S4 doesn't bluescreen on it's own, just when you launch TSP/TP. This would mean a complete rewrite of the streaming software .... and that's going to be an epic task.



I know that she is on this community , as are a couple of their tech supports, but i am hoping that the moderators on here see sense, leave this alone and tell them to continue looking for a real solution, not some BS story they are giving now.


I appreciate that they have to defend their product to the end, but giving such bad advice should be stopped immediately, they should stop blaming everyone else and get on with fixing the problem ....


rant over

Mods, be reasonable, leave this for people to read ..it's important.