Cubase, Reason and latency

[jthoni]

I have been using Cubase, and have a mix of audio and midi. I have been routing the midi to an external drum machine, and all is well. I would like more control over reverb for the individual drum sounds, so I am trying to send the midi to Reason. The mere act of linking these two apps causes severe latency. What happens is that the midi stuff stays in sync (i.e. internal midi, external drum machine, and click track are all in sync), but the audio is no where near in sync.

Note: at this point, I am not actually even sending anything to Reason. Where should I start troubleshooting. Would this be an audio card, CPU or RAM issue? Note that my audio card is an ESI Juli@.

Thanks!
~j

[staring]

What's your hardware spec? Tell us more....

[jthoni]

Running Windows Server 2003.
1 GB Athalon w/256 mb RAM
ESI Juli@ (also have a Creative Platinum Live) audio.

Anything else relevant?

~j

[staring]

1 Gig Athlon (AMD), 256 RAM (SDRAM) , and its OS is Windows 2003 Server???

If I were you, I'll downgrade the OS to XP. Server 2003 requirements is 128MB RAM (256 recommended, I assume your Server is Standard Edition). Server spec is high.

[noisewreck]

Never use a Server OS as a workstation. The Windows Server OS's are optimised very differently, and emphasise background tasks, network I/O, etc, and don't work well for running applications on them, specially stuff that requires realtime processing such as music and video. As Staring suggests, go down to Win XP. Also 256MB of RAM is anemic. You chould have at least double that, if not 1GB.

[jthoni]

Yea, I don't have much choice as I am a software programmer and I need to have WS03. I know it is not a great choice, but in reality, WS03 is just XP with some features turned off, and a bunch of services added (that is an over simplification, I know). So far, everything else works fine.

I could do a dual boot, but the easiest way to do that is to install WinXP first, and I had my server set up before I got Cubase. I can still do it, but it is a bit more involved to do XP second, and I do not have the luxury of having my server down right now.

It would be much easier for me to upgrade hardware (esp. RAM).

[staring]

I could understand that coz i was a trained soft programmer as well.... upgrade the RAM man!

Do you run Web Server on your WS03?