Tips to improve MIDI response time?

Greetings,

I've recently hooked up the following:

Ensoniq TS-10
Sonar 3.1
M-Audio USB 1to1 MIDI port w/ in/out connectors
Garritan Personal Orchestra/Kontakt VST

I'd like to be able to hear my GPO instruments (through my PC, obviously) when I strike my Ensoniq keys.

I've hooked it all up correctly, but there's a half-second delay from when I strike the key, to the VST playing the sound. Is there anyway I can improve this lag time? What settings should I be checking? I'm assuming this has nothing to do with audio latency... but I may be wrong.

I'd appreciate your advice.

Kind regards,

ORIGINAL: BermudaComposer
I'm assuming this has nothing to do with audio latency... but I may be wrong.

You are wrong. When it comes to usnig soft synths, it has almost everything to do with latency. I'm not sure about your particular soundcard, but you'll want to be set at 15 ms or below. Much more than that and you'll start noticing delay. If it won't let you select low latency, try different driver settings - WDM and ASIO. Also, your soundcard might have it's own control panel with some serttings to try. You may want to try and delete your AUD.INI (backup first) and restart Sonar and run the wav profiler. Enable only the inputs and outputs you really need to free up as many resources as possible.

But, if I've recorded the MIDI data, it is almost always delayed severely upon playback. Is there a way around this, or do I just have to manually adjust the MIDI data everytime?

This never happens in my setup, so there's no need to adjust MIDI data. What's wrong with your DAW configuration? Give us some details about your OS, soundcard, midi interface, drivers used, things you configured badly , ....

Meanwhile you may find some more info here: http://www.cakewalk.com/forum/tm.asp?m=130201&mpage=1&key=delay%2Ccompensation

That's a little odd. Have you messed with the "timing offset"? It's in Options->Audio, "Advanced" tab under "Synchonization". You can set it to a positive or negative value to set the timing of MIDI playback vs. audio playback.

Fascinating stuff. I never thought of that actually. What effect does adjusting the "midi buffers" have? I've never played with that setting either, so I don't want to disrupt anything unnecessarily.

I'm not sure of everything about "latency", but my impression was that too much latency causes you to hear delays on playback associated with effects. If you're playing your keyboard and everything sounds fine, but there is a delay of the recorded MIDI track on playback, that sounds suspicously like the glitches I get when I record a MIDI track from my Roland Guitar Synth. In that case, the MIDI track sounds fine when I play it back through the Roland's synth, but is glitchy when I play it through the keyboard synth. In other words, it may be a MIDI rather than latency probem.

He is using a VST softsynth so this would have to do with a audio latency. Could you goto your audio settings and tell us how many ms you have on playback and which drivers (soundcard too please) you are using. My "guess" is he is using either a soundblaster product and or a generic MME driverset and probably are in the 50-60ms range on playback timing. Let us know.

Best,