ORIGINAL: Blackwaters End

ORIGINAL: Rbh

Drummers are often more sensitive to the effect, certainly more so than bass players. I don't know if it's due to the percussive nature of the instruments, or just that drummers are more tuned in to timing. But I know that trying to "play drums" on a keyboard with a soft synth is an exercise in frustration, even with short latencies.

I imagine with drummers the physical feedback is more noticable considering the mechanics compared to most other instruments. I can tell the difference when playing a harder pad than when playing a softer pad like a v-Drum.

I just did a recording session last week and had the drummer using my V-drums which were triggering EZ Drummer via MIDI. He found the whole experience pretty disconcerting even with what was (as I perceived it) an extremely small amount of latency. He felt that the drums just lacked "impact" - that immediate response that one experiences with a real drum kit. He's an amazing drummer and did a fine job, but never quite got used to the feel of the V-drums/delay.

What latency setting were you using? I trigger ez-drummer at 1.45ms. Feels good.

What latency setting were you using? I trigger ez-drummer at 1.45ms. Feels good.

Something about saying it feels good when playing the skins is kinda awkward. But if he's using v-drums, i guess he playing with the rubber
Cj
Im so sorry

ORIGINAL: AdamFH

ORIGINAL: Mick

How many hard drives do you have? Do you have your audio on a different drive than the system files?

You know that that is extremely irrelevant to the topic problem, right?

Actually he *is* on the right track, but he has the drive usage mixed up.
If he is using disk streaming VST's, like Ivory for example, using a separate drive dedicated to the VST (not audio as he says) will improve performance and allow him to get lower latencies.

Ivory IMHO is the acid test for latency and streaming.
It sucks cycles like crazy, even on the fastest systems.
I'm talking about 160 voices, concert hall reverb and a few other tweaks.

It's the best IMHO but it does use a lot of power.

Thanks for standing up for me, partially, but I'm going to go a little farther and say that using a second drive for audio will improve performance regardless of whether or not he's using disk streaming VSTs.

The OP says, if I understood him right, that he is getting unexplained pops and clicks at a latency he thinks his computer should be able to handle. And if he has a 4400 dual core with 2 gigs of ram and is only playing a couple of tracks at a time, I think he should, in fact, be able to get 2 ms of latency with the EMU, but that will be harder if he only has 1 hard drive.

Mixing latency is the amount of time SONAR allocates to prepare a buffer full of audio data for playback. A lot of things have to happen before the audio gets played other wise there will be pops and clicks, including, in the case of previously created audio tracks, retrieve audio data from the hard drive. Sonar does not simply load all the audio into memory before the project starts, it retrieves it while the song is playing. If his audio data is on the same drive as his system data, his drive will not be able to retrieve the audio data as quickly and he is more likely to get clicks and pops at a given latency, as well as a bunch of other possible problems which may not seem directly related, such as the dreaded "audio disk full" error that sometimes happen even when your disk is half empty.

I'll go as far as to say that if the OP is using only 1 drive, getting a second and dedicating it to store the audio files is the very next thing he should do in order to improve performance.

Unless I have misunderstood something, which would not be the first time...

Mick

ORIGINAL: wormser

ORIGINAL: AdamFH

ORIGINAL: Mick

How many hard drives do you have? Do you have your audio on a different drive than the system files?

You know that that is extremely irrelevant to the topic problem, right?

Actually he *is* on the right track, but he has the drive usage mixed up.
If he is using disk streaming VST's, like Ivory for example, using a separate drive dedicated to the VST (not audio as he says) will improve performance and allow him to get lower latencies.

Ivory IMHO is the acid test for latency and streaming.
It sucks cycles like crazy, even on the fastest systems.
I'm talking about 160 voices, concert hall reverb and a few other tweaks.

It's the best IMHO but it does use a lot of power.

With a system similar to Duojet (Gigabyte K8U-939, AMD X2 3800+, 2gb of RAM, 3 hard disks) except the soundcard (Mia Echo in my case) I can go to the lowest setting possible with that card: 1,5 ms. Sure, I didn't tested the round-trip latency...

This is with WinXP2 stripped down to the minimum and with projects that are light (VSampler with a big 3gb piano patch with a lot of pedal and a reverb ).

Please note that (weirdly) the only way to achieve this result is to use the ASIO4ALL drivers (not the Echo ASIO one nor WDM).

Add to this that I use Sonar 5 and not 7.

**A little bit OT: last week I tried to add a firewire card because someone gave me his camcorder and just the fact that I add the firewire card (no data transfer on it), gave me some clicks and pops under this low latency... I removed the offending thing and put it in my second computer in place.

ORIGINAL: Mick

Thanks for standing up for me, partially, but I'm going to go a little farther and say that using a second drive for audio will improve performance regardless of whether or not he's using disk streaming VSTs.

The OP says, if I understood him right, that he is getting unexplained pops and clicks at a latency he thinks his computer should be able to handle. And if he has a 4400 dual core with 2 gigs of ram and is only playing a couple of tracks at a time, I think he should, in fact, be able to get 2 ms of latency with the EMU, but that will be harder if he only has 1 hard drive.

Mixing latency is the amount of time SONAR allocates to prepare a buffer full of audio data for playback. A lot of things have to happen before the audio gets played other wise there will be pops and clicks, including, in the case of previously created audio tracks, retrieve audio data from the hard drive. Sonar does not simply load all the audio into memory before the project starts, it retrieves it while the song is playing. If his audio data is on the same drive as his system data, his drive will not be able to retrieve the audio data as quickly and he is more likely to get clicks and pops at a given latency, as well as a bunch of other possible problems which may not seem directly related, such as the dreaded "audio disk full" error that sometimes happen even when your disk is half empty.

I'll go as far as to say that if the OP is using only 1 drive, getting a second and dedicating it to store the audio files is the very next thing he should do in order to improve performance.

Unless I have misunderstood something, which would not be the first time...

Mick
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Absolutely.
If he's recording, using 3 drives is the best way to go IMHO.
That's what I do. I have Sonar on my OS drive, Ivory and a couple of other streaming VSTs on another drive and I have yet another drive for audio.
Three drives total.
I got the impression from the original post that he was talking about monitoring while playing?
He clarified things later.

Enjoy!