OK, what's up with latency? USB/PCI

  • Thread starter Thread starter shagfu
  • Start date Start date
S

shagfu

New member
I have a WindowsXP 750mhz Athlon PC with an Audiophile2496 soundcard, running Cakewalk HomeStudio2002. Runs peachy. I can get real-low latencies without many dropouts.

I also bought a 700mhz iBook and an Emagic 2|6 USB soundcard running DeckLE under OSX.

The thing is, I have to set the latency pretty high, in DeckLE, so that I don't get distorted audio through the USB card.
But when I raise the latency, the audio is layed down in the track in a different place (offset) to any other recorded tracks.

When I raise the latency in HomeStudio2002, it doesn't do that. It only adds latency to any real-time effects. It doesn't seem to be off-setting the recorded audio tracks no matter how high my latency is set.

I'm not using software monitoring on either setup. So it's not a timing issue of me playing to a delay or something.

I read in a Protools forum that their is an inherent latency with the Mbox. And that users should manually go in and shift or nudge a newly recorded track/clip back a certain amount of samples to account for the delay.

Is this something inherent with all USB devices, or is it because I'm using DeckLE?

Any insight into this would be appreciated, as I would like to get a low-cost mobile recording solution put together to complement my desktop one.

-many thanks,
Shag Fu
 
jake-owa said:
What kind of latencey are you getting? How many ms?
Click to expand...

In Cake, I can get it down to three or four ms. Depending on the song. Which I find perfectly acceptable considering some of the other cards I had before I bought the audiophile. I think I've gotten it to go down to 1.5ms on a rare occassion or two.

In DeckLE, I'm not sure. Because it doesn't tell you what it is. It just lets you set the buffer size (32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc). It doesn't list anything in milliseconds.

Sometimes I can get the 2|6 to run pretty good with a buffer setting of 32. And have it have less pops and clicks than the higher buffer settings. But the idea that the higher the buffer setting, the more offset there is concerns me. I'm not well versed enough in recording to know whether this is inherent in all DAWs or something specific to Deck.
 
is it DeckLE (the software) or the USB?

when you say you are using HomeStudio and DeckLE, are you using them both on the same machine?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top