Awful MIDI latency with Win2K

  • Thread starter Thread starter ElSilva
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ElSilva

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I've seen this question bandied about in various places, but have found no satisfactory answers. I've done a fairly thorough search on Google Groups. My setup:

PIII-1GHz 384MB RAM, plenty-o-everything
Windows 2000 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy (for MIDI)
Delta 66/OMNI I/O
Yamaha S80 keyboard
Sonar 1.X

When I start up Sonar, MIDI latency is nil, it tracks beautifully. 15 minutes later, it degrades to, literally, a 3 second delay between playing the keys and hearing the sound. It's amazingly long, I can't even believe it. This machine does everything else wonderfully. This smells like a bug somewhere.

I generally have to reboot to regain my near-zero MIDI latency, but it doesn't last long enough to be useful.

I'm puzzled, any advice? Perhaps a different MIDI interface, like a USB-based device would do better than the Audigy? Maybe those 3rd-party kxdrivers for the Audigy? Maybe it's an inherent probem in Win2K?

Thanks,

ElSilva
 
Yes, its a problem and mostly with Sound Blasters. If you want to wait for an answer as to why from Creative, you'll be here for a while...

I had the same problem with my SB Live. I went out and bought a Midiman MidiSport 2x2 USB interface for $70 and the problem is gone for good.
 
MIDI latency problem with Win2K Solved!

...though the fix was rather drastic. It involves removing ACPI functionality from W2K. Since I did this, I've had no MIDI tracking problems whatsoever.

http://www.cakewalknet.com/tipshardwareng.htm#ACPI

I would change one thing in the instructions. I really didn't need any installation disks when W2K rebooted. First of all, I wouldn't want to have Windows reload my crusty old drivers from CDs. So whenever it requested a .sys file, I gave it winnt/system32/drivers, and whenever it requested a .dll, I gave it winnt/system32. The only driver it couldn't find was some .ex_ file, which is a compressed .exe file. Naturally, W2K doesn't keep these around after it installs the drivers. So I had to put my MAudio CD in. W2K found the .ex_ on CD, and informed me that the version on disk was newer, and did I want to keep the newer version? Well of course!!! So everything went without a hitch, and I was back up and running in less than 30 minutes.

At the end, I checked my IRQ sharing. The only thing being shared was my Audigy sound card with my Radeon graphics card. I was bummed, since it's the Audigy I use for MIDI. I really wanted that on an IRQ by itself. But, I tested out Sonar, and it's tracking beautifully, so I'm not going to worry about it.

Good luck to anyone else who tries this.
 
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