Soundfont soft synth and latency

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boten
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2004/09/14 03:43:49 (permalink)

Soundfont soft synth and latency

I mainly use soundfont in MIDI , sfz+ is the soft synth I use for that purpose.
Even though I'm aware that soundfonts require lot of CPU resources to run I typically run several channels without major issues provided I do not push the latency below 15 ms. Sometimes I found that when I record short duration notes this latency is not good enough and lot of quantizing needs to be done to fix that. (just as a reference I can run at about 5 ms latency if using the soundcard MIDI soft synth but it is pretty crappy and I gave up on it)
I have two questions:

- Does anybody has experience with soundfonts running (say 5 or 6 patches running at the same time, where some of the sounds are several MB sized) at lower latency levels, could I expect something better with soundfonts, I use the sfz draft mode to compose music so it requires less cpu resources)? (My system is described below)

- Is it recommended to use a hard synth, such as an external sampler to free up CPU usage for soundont playing instead of the sfz+? Does anyone have experience with such samplers and how are they used with HS?

Even I use a lot of soundfonts patches in parallel, I didn't have a dropout yet but I hear some glitches from time to time especially when two piano type sounds are loaded in the sfz+?

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Thanks.
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    AT
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    RE: Soundfont soft synth and latency 2004/09/14 10:59:53 (permalink)
    Render your softsynths tracks one at a time as audio and with effects (mute all the other tracks rather than solo). Audio tracks take up much less CPU than softsynths so you can run your song at a lower latency. Archieve your softsynth tracks and keep them in case you need to go back and edit them, but they won't be a drag on your CPU.

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    Guitslinger
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    RE: Soundfont soft synth and latency 2004/09/14 12:30:28 (permalink)
    I'm working on a project that utilizes one softsynth that is not a cpu hog, and two instances of SFZ with one soundfont 15mb in size, and the other 54mb. Both instances of SFZ are maxed out performance-wise. The quality is set to 72--the most demanding, and the mode is SF32, also the most demanding. With a P4 2.4ghz cpu, my maximum cpu usage is 30% at the lowest latency setting for my ASIO driver mode, 4 ms. By adding a couple of more instances of SFZ with added soundfonts my usage will probably jump up to 70% or higher.

    There are clearly limits to how many instances of SFZ one can run in a project. Keep in mind the RAM required to run a soundfont using SFZ is 2.5 times the size of the font. If you try to use five 50mb soundfonts, 1.25 gb of RAM is required.

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    boten
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    RE: Soundfont soft synth and latency 2004/09/14 16:54:14 (permalink)
    AT, THanks, I thought that as a potential solution before, however I rely very much on the interdependency of different instruments when I'm composing, so it has never happened to me that I finished a whole track without being almost finished with the rest, because I work in parallel. In this case I would need to apply bounce to tracks very often and I guess it would be a nightmare.

    Thanks guitslinger for the data, I guess just wanted to get some proportion about my minimum latency under high sfz utilization and the conclusion is that I might not be doing that bad considering I'm using an USB card and no ASIO driver. I also tried changing the DMA sample number settings but when I decrease them a little I only hear noise. Well...
    Appreciate your inputs.
    < Message edited by boten -- 9/14/2004 4:56:46 PM >
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