Is it normal to have a slight delay?

[Jsn7821]

I have my keyboard plugged into my midi-in on my delta 1010lt, its kind of a cheap keyboard (does that make a difference?) maybe 2-3 years old. My friend is letting my borrow it, its a Yamaha PSR something.

Anyway, when I play it... the sound that comes out of my computer is about 1ms later, and its hard to record with drums because of that. I'm new to the midi scene so any help in the right direction would be awesome. Thanks.

 

[ssscientist]

Midi is midi - it doesn't matter if it's coming out of a cheap keyboard or not.

And you must be talking about a whole lot more than 1ms if it's actually throwing you off when programming drums.

Please post again and include the specs of your computer and more importantly what software you are using. I suspect that simply switching to ASIO mode will cure your latency problem...

 

[AlChuck]

1 ms is one-thousandth of a second. Human reaction time is in the hundreds of milliseconds. A delay of even a couple of tens of milliseconds is undetectable by most people. The delay between when you hear a drummer five feet away from you is more than a few milliseconds.

The problem you describe is common with playing software synths. Unless they support low-latency drivers (ASIO or WDM), the time it takes the computer to get the MIDI message, decipher it, identify the correct sound to play, and then get that sound into the output, is too long. With an ASIO or WDM driver and a host program that supports them, this delay should be below 20 ms, maybe down as low as 2 or 3 ms, and will be imperceptible. Without it, you simply can't play a softsynth in real-time.

When you play a MIDI file, the delay is compensated for by the software. But in real time, it can only be minimized, and only with the right drivers.

 

[Jsn7821]

Okay, thanks for the help. I switched it to the ASIO driver, and it changed the latency from 92 ms to 12ms. A huge difference. Plus it gave me a better sense of how much 1ms is.