MIDI Sound Card?

[tacman7]

Several issues here.

Midi latency, and ASIO latency that you set you sound card to run at.

Midi latency is very small, PCI is the best but you need software to even detect it. I use a USB interface and don't notice it at all.

The latency you run your sound card at is what your talking about.

I used to use a yamaha card that I ran at 22ms. Little hard to play in real time, a 22ms lag from the time you hit the keys till you hear the sound.

The 'card' I use now I run at 4ms. 4 seems pretty 'live' just like playing a stand alone keyboard. When I use an fx from my UAD card in real time it doubles that. I can track a lot of things at 8ms, but I have a little problem with tight guitar strumming parts, so I use 4 there.

With a good card you have a choice of how low to set your latency. A cheap card can't handle going very low. The lower you go, the harder you computer has to work and the less it can do. It's a trade off. I have an abit/intel board with a 2.8g quad now and I can run 10-12+ good VSTi's (some use more resources than others) @4ms and do everything I want to do.

The new cards are all pretty good compared to the old days, so you should be able to find plenty of cards capable of low latency.

Zero latency is where your listening to your audio input straight through the card and not through your daw. The other way is when you monitor through your DAW(cubase) and use VST effects for your audio. VSTi can't use zero latency because it takes time for the computer to generate the audio and then send it through the DAW.

[garww]

Great run through. But, I want to re-hash about thinking what a sound card actually does. This side of the port, it really doesn't do much. It's only mission is to play what is sent to it. It's dumb hardware.

[brandondrury]

Your controller will pass MIDI to any number of MIDI players available for download and will usually give you good performance even with the MS GS Wavetable built into windows (it may not be in W7- I don't know).

I don't know about the soundcards from way back in the day but I've never encountered a stock soundcard that could playback at 128-160 samples buffer regardless of the drivers used. I need a real deal audio interface for that.

Brandon

[garww]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

I don't know about the soundcards from way back in the day but I've never encountered a stock soundcard that could playback at 128-160 samples buffer regardless of the drivers used. I need a real deal audio interface for that.

Brandon

But, all that is really audio processing before it goes to the output bus ?? It won't be the first time I've missed something by mile : ) If it shows up in the swap/cpu meters it's computer bottleneck. All a card does is take the prcessed channels A and B from the bus ?? No ??

[tacman7]

I know what your saying about all the sound card does is audio processing and all the work of VSTi and VST fx are on your computer and all. But there's still a level of quality/horsepower required to do low latency audio that doesn't come with stock sound cards like Brandon is saying.

Of course things are changing all the time. You can get low latency pretty cheap now days for a basic 2in 2out card.

[garww]

I do feel bad about skewing the thread, but I'm just trying to understand the process. I assume the sound card may only have i/o buffers - much like a CD/DVD. It's not like a Video Card that does real work. USB is still a serial bus.

[tacman7]

A card has to do ADC to input sound into the computer and it has to do DAC to get the sounds so you can hear them. Your going to be limited by your bus speed, whether PCI, firewire, or USB.

Some cards do a lot more, like DSP, like reverb or compression. Also a lot of routing can go on, having a send go from cubase out through S/Pdif to a processor and back, or multiple speaker sets with active crossover etc.

But the simple stereo bus output from cubase to the soundcard while processing a few inputs from the sound card should be pretty easy work processor wise for a modern soundcard I would think.

Just that non pro audio quality equipment doesn't deliver low latency because it was not a design goal to start with.

My old SW1000xg card was an expensive card when it was new and has a lot of features for processing audio but it can't do low latency, just wasn't something available at that time for that price.

Also there was something about how sound cards process their audio through the OS where pro audio has their own low latency drivers. That can be a bottleneck.

[garww]

That has been my point - that it is the drivers. But I don't know that.

[garww]

I had to take my nap. Today, I still use my basic scheme of using one card for recording and another for playback. I still test hardware latency with a simple setup. If delay occurs after that, it's audio processing.

Most noticeable with my soundfont MIDI, is if a track calls up a soft that isn't loaded - and I usually have 20-40Mb loaded in it's own memory slot. There will be that delay when it has to load something new. I find that easy to translate to what happens with plug-ins.

[garww]

Here's a FAQ clip from the KX site - which is one of the drivers I used with my $7 PCI soundblaster. It also has kernal streaming.

"
Q. Are the kX drivers aimed at musicians or gamers or both?

A. At present the kX driver is aimed primarily at musicians, and especially those who wish to get the most out of their soundcards (and who have traditionally been left behind by the big soundcard manufacturers, who prefer to concentrate their efforts on the more lucrative gamers market). Features designed specifically for gamers will however be added as development of the drivers continues.
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Q. Does the kX driver have ASIO support? ASIOv2?

A. ASIO v2.0 - based hosts are fully supported, however, some ASIO2 features are not implemented due to hardware limitations. 24-bit ASIO support is planned for 10k2-based boards.
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Q. What kind of latency can I expect to see?

A. The minimum expected ASIO latency is expected to be 5.33 ms (and possibly as low as 2.66 ms, depending on your hardware/software setup).
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Q. Will I get low latency with Cakewalk's Sonar?

A. The kX driver is a kernel-streaming WDM driver, and a latency as low as 10 ms can be expected under Sonar (depending on your hardware/software setup).
"