In my previous post about the BCF2000, I mentioned I upgraded my music PC to XP SP2. While I was doing that I thought I should check out the other drivers for the various bits of kit I have hooked up (MIDI keyboard, audio interface, etc). I noticed that there was a newer driver for my Audiophile, one that depended on XP SP2.

Well, given I’d just upgraded to SP2, this seemed like just the trick. Surely when it comes to drivers, latest is best, right? (Yes, I’m aware of how naive that sounds, but at the time it seemed reasonable).  I downloaded and installed the latest driver, and all hell broke loose.

Live took ages to load, the motorised faders on the BCF2000 took an age to react to changes on screen. Also, I’d lost my lovely low-latency audio recording (I’ve always been able to record guitar by monitoring live through the chain of VST’s, rather than having to use the monitor bypass on the audiophile). I could still get sound (well, some sound, it was far from consistent), but there was obviously something wrong.

In the end, I uninstalled the XP SP2 driver for the Audiophile, and installed the Windows 2000 driver on my XP SP2 system. Perfect. Everything was back to before. I had my low latency monitoring back, Live was snappy again, the BCF2000 reacted in real time, all was good with the world. I’m sure that the updated driver provides all sorts of wonderful benefits (actually, I’m not, but there must be some reason for it to exist) but it’ll be awhile before I try and update that particular driver again.