Newbie alert! Latency during Midi playback

[DinoBob]

Hello all. Please be patient with a newbie.

I have a dual core Turion laptop, 2 GB RAM. Crappy Sigmatel onboard audio chip.

I am currently just getting my foot in the water regarding MIDI. I am trying to put together a solo acoustic act, and I want to use MIDI to enhance it a bit. Predominantly, I will be using MIDI to control a Digitech Vocalist VHM5 Vocal Harmony processor. I want to use a click track in my ear, and play along with that while sending patch and chord changes to the Vocalist via the sequencer.

I am just in the testing stages, and am using a MIDI file I downloaded from the Internet to test demo or fee versions of some simple software sequencers. Currently I am using Midi Maestro.

The issue I am up against, for the moment, seems to be latency of the General MIDI playback on the onboard sound. When I send a single channel to my M-Audio USB/MIDI interface, and out to an external synth, the external synth is a little bit ahead of the sound card.

Is there anything I can do about this? I have found some things on audio latency. I am not sure if that applies to MIDI.

Thanks. So far this board looks like a great resource.

Bob

[adorian]

Bob, I think you should be better off trying out some of the cheap DAW programs, like Cubase LE. I don't think you should be getting midi latency triggering from the computer, maybe you mean while recording patch changes to the computer?
If I were you I'd go with a dedicated midi soundcard as that might be your problem. There are some cheap options, I personally like the Midi Buddy by M-Audio as it is very stable. You could try ASIO4ALL drivers instead of your current audio driver as that might fix it. Just do a search for it.

[richiebee]

This is very unlikely to be MIDI latency. It's most likely audio latency because you're using a crappy built in sound card.

If it were MIDI latency, it would also apply to the sounds coming through your synthesizer.

You can try an ASIO driver for your sound card (ASIO4ALL is a good place to start).

Ultimately, a pro-audio interface or soundcard, designed for low latency will give you much better performance than your built in soundcard. However, it's extremely unlikely they will have an onboard synthesizer chip, which is how your current card is producing your MIDI sounds. So, you'll need to look into a sequencer that takes VI's. There are several standards when it comes to VI's. VST is the most popular.

Before you go spending out though, maybe you should try connecting your Vocal Harmonizer to your computer. If you don't actually need sounds from your computer, you probably don't need a pro-interface.

[DinoBob]

Well, I think you're right. It's probably sound latency from the card.

The software actually compensates for this, by allowing for settings that delay the MIDI triggers coming from the USB/MIDI interface, so that the data is synced artificially with the delayed sound coming from the card. That is a smart programming move.

Still, I am looking for a good, inexpensive package that will blend WAV and MIDI, and allow for triggering of external devices. Any thoughts?

[adorian]

Get an audio card with Cubase Le 4, I personally like f/w over USB so I'd say Presonus.

[Flash]

I agree with what the others say here. I use a high quality Soundblaster card along with it's Live Drive. Soundblaster uses soundfonts, so I replaced the default banks with pro soundfonts and MIDI on my computer sounds terrific. You may have to disable your onboard sound, but once set up correctly, it should resolve your latency issues.