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Noob - MIDI latency


Yonderknight
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Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to MIDI stuff. I've been anticipating getting a MIDI keyboard for a long time and finally went out and bought one yesterday.

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Oxygen61-main.html

I installed the USB drivers and got it to work with FL studio 7 pretty quickly. One thing I noticed though was that whatever I recorded seemed to be off-timing a little. It really bugged me. I'm pretty sure it was not because of the way I was playing (I'm not really used to springy keys, but I think I got the hang of them). But everything I recorded sounded off-timing enough to sound really bad.

Is this caused by the USB connection? It only supports USB 1.1, and I heard this can cause problems. I'm thinking it could be caused by these possibilities:

1) USB 1.1

2) My software ( FL studio 7 )

3) My computer specs

What do you guys think? Is there any way to fix this easily? Will I have to buy a sound card with a MIDI interface if I want to be able to record stuff decently?

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Try these drivers here http://www.asio4all.com/ . Personally I try to stear clear of onboard peripherals as they are not usually of the best quality. Having said that, I have a Soundblaster 128 soundcard that I bought with my first computer 9 years ago which is still going strong. Give the drivers a go and see if it's an improvement, you can always uninstall them.

          G

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You have to identify if it's latency between the MIDI keyboard and computer, or in the playback of the audio.

ASIO helps reduce the latency of the audio playback, as you can tweak the buffer size, the smaller the buffer, the quicker it can playback the audio (imagine it as a bucket you need to fill before you can empty it into your speakers  ;D ) However, if you set the buffer too small, your computer might not keep up and you get underruns (the bucket is emptied to your speakers before it was filled up) and you'll get pops, clicks, noise etc.

I recently had some trouble with pops and clicks and thought it was the MB-SID but actually was some system tray app that was occasionally hogging CPU causing the ASIO buffer to occasionally lag.

BTW... ASIO4ALL v2 is installed as part of FLStudio 7.

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hi

asio4all has always fixed any latency problem i had on slower windows machines, if you want to gain some extra ms (and stability) i recommend, especially if you have an older machine (i guess because of the usb1.1) to have an extra "audio only" partition and install to keep clean and away from non-audio software.

It s also usefull to have the audio partition as first partition cause it will spin on the external side of the HD and it will be faster.

Simone

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I may be way of the mark here but you could try updating your soundcard drivers to ASIO ones if you don't already have them... Theres some called ASIO4ALL. I tried this and it speeded my system so it may be worth a try.

                        G

wow , asio4all does the opposite, slows down your system like fuck. Get a real soundcard like RME or Lynx if you are serious about it.

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wow , asio4all does the opposite, slows down your system like fuck. Get a real soundcard like RME or Lynx if you are serious about it.

Hmnnn.... It really speeded my system up. I am using a soundblaster PCI128 though. ASIO4ALL is only for when there aren't any proper ASIO drivers for your soundcard so you could try doing a search for ASIO and your sound card make and see what comes up.

                G

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ASIO is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. Everything else on this page, including the numbers 16, 48 and 100 is or may become a trademark of Microsoft, Corp., except for trademarks of their respective owners that are used for product identification purposes only. The rest, as well as the stuff mentioned above that has not yet become a trademark of Microsoft, Corp. is Copyright©2003-2004, Michael Tippach.

i think that Mr tippach has done quite a good job, well let s say that he s given the possibility to asio-less soundcard owners (most of pc users) to use their pcs for audio purposes, windows and steinberg didn t go so far, because they thought obviously it was not a good business. err am i going off topic?

Asio4all is not an out of the box  app, it often needs some tweaking, playboss, have you read the manual? how small was your buffer?

simone

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wow , asio4all does the opposite, slows down your system like fuck. Get a real soundcard like RME or Lynx if you are serious about it.

It trully depends on your system and more importantly your soundcard.

it works best with AC 97 soundcards, as this is what it was originally designed for.

I find on my laptop (AC 97) it gets the latency down to as little as 5ms, but on my desktop which uses a Sound Blaster Live 24, its not as good.

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YorderKnight, a simple answer to your question....

You need to turn down the buffer in the audio options of fruity loops.

If you turn this down too low, the sound may become distorted/weird.

Id also recommend using Asio4all in your case, seen as youre using an integrated sound card.

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Goblinz/playboss: asio4all is just a wrapper, so that WDM drivers can be used in asio apps... Because it still uses the normal WDM drivers and adds ASIO 'on top', it may, in some circumstances, decrease soundcard latency, and will, always, increase CPU consumption, because it's doing more work. So it'll "speed up" your audio and otherwise "slow down" your PC. So you're both right, and you're arguing over poorly applied terminology. Now go and kiss and make up.  ;D

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I didn't realise I was argueing, just commenting and learning.

As I said in my first post, I didn't know if I was way off the mark. All I was going on was that my sound from Fruityloops was really bad quality and was lagging. I couldn't get my vocoder VST to work so I read the Vocoder manual and it said I needed to have ASIO drivers to get things rolling. I did some hunting on the net and found ASIO4ALL which fixed everything and didn't slow my system down. All I was saying was that it worked for me and therefore may be worth a try.

In my experience if something isn't working right then you do some hunting and try and fix it.... Sometimes it works, others it doesn't, in which case you try something else.

              G

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which vocoder VST is that? Im so dumb bout vocoder softies that I m somewhat sure I want a Roland 350 once , btw Im exceptionally good with synths and cant get the sucker accept my carrier wave or what and do somthing nice  :P

I can't remember, to be honest. I think it was the Orange vocoder. I never got it working properly as learning FL got sidetracked when I found Ucapps.... A lot of things got sidetracked when I found Ucapps... I blame TK :D The thing does come with an instruction manual so shouldn't be too hard to get working now I have the ASIO drivers. I had problems linking the two tracks (VST synth and external microphone) into one track in the mixer with the vocoder plugin selected. I will get back to it someday as vocoders are ubercool.

I have schematics (from the 80s) for the elector vocoder which I'm looking at giving the MBHP treatment as soon as I learn a bit more and get some spare time. It seems like quite an advanced vocoder and will let you modulate different "chunks" of the sound spectrum together resulting in the output sounding like daffy duck, etc... A modulation matrix would suit this well and the various settings could be stored in patches. It's still a long way off, but something to work towards.

            G

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yes Im am sure analog is the way to go... This is unlike loudspeaker crossover ( im into that) your pulse response here will degrade like shit because of 8th order filters. Too mcuh in the game to emulate that roland 350 for example. As I want *that* authentic sound not else I may want to buy it too . 

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