WaveRT Drivers - I have them!

I bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop back in August with the hopes of recording and playing music through it. They only had one laptop model with XP so I went ahead and decided to take my chances with Vista. Unfortunately, I found out very soon that the stand-alone versions of my favorite softsynths, Absynth, Akoustik Piano, and Elektrik Piano had horrific latency with the WDM drivers of the integrated Audigy soundcard. I bought a firebox and those Asio drivers had good latency but there were still some audio glitches that would show up at odd times and having to hook that up and have another thing plugged in was raining on my parade big time. The whole idea of a laptop is to be as portable as possible, right?!

I decided to try playing them through Sonar (the new 7.01) to see if that would magically fix things. The Asio drivers were the same and the glitches were still there. When looking at the drivers section under the audio menu, I noticed the Audigy soundcard was listed as WaveRT. I unplugged the firebox, rebooted and tried it with the integrated soundcard. Now, in standalone mode, I could only bring the latency down to 15ms which is just not workable for playing anything faster than quarter notes. With Sonar I could bring the latency down to 6ms! I didn't even try going lower because the latency is instantaneous! I did start getting glitches though and upped the latency. Oddly enough even with high latency settings, it was still very playable. But, I was still getting glitches. I turned off multi-processor support and that fixed it, for the most part.

Anyway, the latency with the WaveRT drivers is just awesome. I'm still having glitching problems which I'm going to call Cakewalk about because I've beat myself up over them long enough. I was on the verge of loading XP, but I'm hoping I can stay with Vista. I hate these growing pains, but the new WaveRT driver possibilities seem worth it.

Not every company will be usin waveRT. multiprocessor mode may need looking into looks like they are issues with it and glitching.

Actually my soundcard is a SigmaTel soundcard. I was under the impression when I ordered it from Dell that the laptop would have an audigy soundcard.

Either way, they are WaveRT drivers and amazing. I believe I've finally solved the intermittent glitching that happens. I switched the playback timing driver from the SigmaTel digital out to the headphone/speaker out. Seems to be working and fingers are crossed.

It's sad that it seems a lot of manufacturers, especially the "pro" ones, have little interest in supporting this new audio standard. I am by no means a big microsoft proponent either. But I've seen what is possible with the latency of these drivers and it's noticeably better.

I like the WaveRT Echo drivers as well. They seem more stable but they dont play back wmv files in WMP other than 64k.

Unless something has changed, and IIRC... Because of how M$ architected WaveRT, the only way to take advantage of WaveRT benefits is with a PCI or PCIe interface. That means that USB and Firewire interfaces are high and dry (well, except for WDM and ASIO). For a laptop, this means using a PC card or Express card to get WaveRT.

BTW... the onboard sound (Sigma-Tel, RealTek, etc.) interfaces through PCI/PCIe.

ORIGINAL: losguy

Unless something has changed, and IIRC... Because of how M$ architected WaveRT, the only way to take advantage of WaveRT benefits is with a PCI or PCIe interface. That means that USB and Firewire interfaces are high and dry (well, except for WDM and ASIO). For a laptop, this means using a PC card or Express card to get WaveRT.

Which is exactly why I specifically chose a PCIe system (Motu 2408MkIII & 24I/O). WaveRT may just end up being the only truly viable audio driver in Vista. There is no way on earth I would go USB or even FireWire because I think the only way Vista will be capable of truly low latency is with WaveRT.

That's probably the most prudent path, and it's a no-brainer if the manufacturer of that interface already has a WaveRT driver implemented.

The only thing that would change the equation is if M$ can figure out how to make it work with the USB and/or FW protocol. IIRC there is something fundamental about them that would make that difficult.

So, until that happens, or until Vista can demonstrate WDM/ASIO performance at least on-par with XP, then I can't consider devices like the Saffire or Konnekt 24D with any longevity into Vista, at least for low latency live applications. That situation leaves me looking for an express card interface with built-in preamps, channel strips, and FX. Or it makes me step back to my old setup: a straight I/O interface and a digital mixer.

That limitation is quite frustrating.

ASIO4ALL supports WaveRT. YOu might want to try that and see how it goes