Latency Problems PLEASE HELP!

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ad0lescnts

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I got a MOTU 828mkII for christmas and i hooked it up with my SONAR 3. I'm using the WDM/KS driver and the buffer size is 11.6 msec. (the fastest) there is some noticable latency. What do i do?

i have a intel P4 2.4 Ghz with 256 MB of ram. (I just ordered a GB of ram and should be here pretty soon)

could the RAM be the problem? or just a setting?

thanks,
T
 
You'll never get rid of latency all the way, just monitor before you input to the computer, don't monitor the computer outs while overdubbing.

Pat
 
Isn't there an ASIO driver that you can set it to?

If not, then more RAM *might* help but I'm not completely sure how much an effect RAM has on that kind of thing.

I'm running an athlon XP 2100+ at 2.0ghz with 512mb RAM with a MOTU 2408 MKII with ASIO drivers and Cubase.

with the buffer at 256 i think my buffer is about 7ms...at 128 its about 4ms, and at 64 its 2ms.
 
are ASIO drivers better than WDM? cuz i can set either. the latency isnt BAD.. but it's enough to make the recording sound sloppy. anything?

thanks.
T
 
pahtcup just told ya, monitor your signal before it goes through your machine. i'm running wdm drivers in samplitude and latency isn't an issue because i monitor through the desk.
if the signal you record is recorded with latency just hit the automatic latency compensation (or what ever it's called in sonar) button somewhere in your options menu.

and yes, asio should get you lower in-the-box latency
 
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By all means use ASIO, but there is no technical reason why WDM/KS should have a higher latency and in Sonar, KS has an advantage if the very lowest driver buffer won't work but the next step up is too high.

The very lowest soundcard DMA buffer is usually 64 samples - how low does the MOTU go?

Try this - set the MOTU DMA buffer to minimum, open Sonar and (using WDM/KS) make sure the latency slider is at minimum, buffers in playback queue is 2.
Run the soundcard profiler. You will then see the lowest latency your system is (theoretically) capable of. You can now fine tune the performance by raising the latency slider a notch at a time until you have glitch free recording. If the MOTU buffer was 64 samples (about 1.5 to 2ms at 44.1 or 48Khz), then the slider will allow you to adjust in increments of whatever the minimum was.

Note that driver setup panels and Sonar often report different latency times for the buffer value - some programs round the figure up and some round it down, and it will be less the higher the sample rate you record in. If you always want to record at 88.2 or 96Khz, a buffer of 64 is a bit impractical, 96 or 128 is probably better in that case. If you are running plugins using input monitoring, the latency you hear is at least twice the figure you have reported to you - it has to go in and then back out + the plug-ins own process buffer + the hardware buffers on the interfaces convertors. 11.6ms is actually a little over 25ms in practice for input monitoring. That's equivalent to playing a guitar while being 25 feet away from your amp - hence your timing difficulty!

If you use ASIO, you will only have the choice of latency provided by the MOTU buffer size selection.

Have to say though that I've seen very uncomplimentary things about MOTU Windows drivers - they have a better reputation working on Apple systems. Might well be worth checking if there is an updated driver on the MOTU website.

I'm assuming you have your pc hardware and Windows o/s are optimised? These pro interfaces need a clean machine - you can't often get away with a default Windows install as you can with a normal Windows soundcard system, not if you want the lowest latency pro interfaces can provide.
 
thanks veryyy much for all that info. I'm messing with it right now, but what you just said made me leary.

I'm assuming you have your pc hardware and Windows o/s are optimised? These pro interfaces need a clean machine - you can't often get away with a default Windows install as you can with a normal Windows soundcard system, not if you want the lowest latency pro interfaces can provide.

i dont. how do i do this?

sorry, i'm new at this computer based stuff
T
 
Well, ok - a search on "optimising XP music" should find a lot of stuff.

But there is a lot of info on this page...
http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.htm

Of these tweaks, there's a lot of argument over what is worth doing. I think items 1, 8 and 25 are essential and personally I always do 2,3,4,6,7,9,13, and 26 too. don't dive in and do everything unless you have to. If it ain't broke...

Tascam used to have a really nice pdf on optimising but I can't find it anymore. Anyone?

Some good FAQs here...
http://sound-on-sound2.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?a=frm&s=215094572&f=514099644

One thing you may read - disabling ACPI. On a recent pc with XP, this isn't something you should have to do.

For top performance, another hard disk just for audio/media files definately helps.
 
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