Dumb question regarding sound cards

J

JayCay

New member
Hey peeps,
I have kind of a dumb question but I couldn't find any answer so here it is. I am planning on getting an entry level soundcard soon. I don't plug any external devices (except my usb midi keyboard) but I start getting a lot of delay once I got a few vst's going. So my question was this:
Do I have to run my midi keyboard through the soundcard ? or can I just plug it in directly to the computer as before? i'm on a tight budget and I don't wanna find out I have to buy an additional adapter once I got the soundcard
 
A soundcard is almost worthless for you if all you plan on doing is using a midi controller.

What do you mean by it's adding delay? Generally, your latency is your latency and adding more and more VSTi won't continually increase your latency increase it under the circumstances you're in (no live sources,just midi sequencing). It might bug your CPU out and your sound will get all garbled and glitchy, but your latency will pretty much be the same.

Are you using ASIO drivers? You can get ASIO4ALL for free if you aren't.
 
JayCay said:
Hey peeps,
I have kind of a dumb question but I couldn't find any answer so here it is. I am planning on getting an entry level soundcard soon. I don't plug any external devices (except my usb midi keyboard) but I start getting a lot of delay once I got a few vst's going. So my question was this:
Do I have to run my midi keyboard through the soundcard ? or can I just plug it in directly to the computer as before? i'm on a tight budget and I don't wanna find out I have to buy an additional adapter once I got the soundcard
Click to expand...

some missing information that would help us help you:

cpu
os
ram
internal or external soundcard?
current soundcard drivers

daw
specific vsts that cause this problem
 
I'm using a laptop with an integrated soundcard and ASIO4ALL. i7 at 2.2ghz, 8gb of RAM, Windows 7 64bit, using Ableton Live. I have the ASIO4ALL setup at 256 samples.
To get back to what you were saying, Mr. sickVisionz, that's exactly what happens:
If a do a piano track on a new project, it's fine, I have about 20ms latency which is not really noticeable for me. However, if I want to add a piano after having already added a bunch of strings and effects etc, then it becomes nearly impossible. It still says 20ms in the asio window in ableton but the latency becomes huge the more I have stuff going on.
Which is why I was contemplating buying a soundcard but maybe it's a CPU issue ? (then that's fine I'm planning on replacing my computer anyways)
 
JayCay said:
I'm using a laptop with an integrated soundcard and ASIO4ALL. i7 at 2.2ghz, 8gb of RAM, Windows 7 64bit, using Ableton Live. I have the ASIO4ALL setup at 256 samples.
To get back to what you were saying, Mr. sickVisionz, that's exactly what happens:
If a do a piano track on a new project, it's fine, I have about 20ms latency which is not really noticeable for me. However, if I want to add a piano after having already added a bunch of strings and effects etc, then it becomes nearly impossible. It still says 20ms in the asio window in ableton but the latency becomes huge the more I have stuff going on.
Which is why I was contemplating buying a soundcard but maybe it's a CPU issue ? (then that's fine I'm planning on replacing my computer anyways)
Click to expand...

Are those numbers exact or just guestimates? I ask only because 256 samples shouldn't be anywhere near 20ms of latency. My computer is set to 384 samples and that's 9ms. I'm not sure what to say if those numbers are accurate. If they aren't though, try increasing your sample latency. 256 should be somewhere around like 5-7ms, which is probably asking too much for a stock soundcard (although I've used older dedicated soundcards back around 2008-ish and found 256 samples to be asking too much of even those and that was with a literal card as opposed to a USB audio interface, which I found to be a worse performer always).


If those numbers are accurate, something wonky is going on with your settings (either ASIO or Ableton) and that's probably what the issue is.


bandcoach said:
increase your buffer size to at least 4096 samples
Click to expand...

Setting the ASIO setting to 4096 would be pretty much unusable. 4096 samples at 44.1kHz is pushing near 100 ms of latency, something that would definitely be noticeable when trying to record MIDI data.
 
Mr. sickVisionz said:
Are those numbers exact or just guestimates? I ask only because 256 samples shouldn't be anywhere near 20ms of latency. My computer is set to 384 samples and that's 9ms. I'm not sure what to say if those numbers are accurate. If they aren't though, try increasing your sample latency. 256 should be somewhere around like 5-7ms, which is probably asking too much for a stock soundcard (although I've used older dedicated soundcards back around 2008-ish and found 256 samples to be asking too much of even those and that was with a literal card as opposed to a USB audio interface, which I found to be a worse performer always).


If those numbers are accurate, something wonky is going on with your settings (either ASIO or Ableton) and that's probably what the issue is.




Setting the ASIO setting to 4096 would be pretty much unusable. 4096 samples at 44.1kHz is pushing near 100 ms of latency, something that would definitely be noticeable when trying to record MIDI data.
Click to expand...

If I go on the Asio window in ableton, it says 23 ms so I assume that's what it is. I have my microphone disabled in ASIO (for the longest time I had it enabled and it needlessly gave me an additional 20ms) so I guess the verdict is that my integrated soundcard is a piece of *** haha.
But doesn't the fact that i'm using ASIO4ALL as opposed to a real ASIO driver mean that I will get more latency ?
 
Why do people think that MIDI has latency - latency is about audio processing not MIDI processing time - given that the MIDI data rate is 31.5 kBaud it is not an issue to process the data (this equates to about 315kbps).

As for the numbers you quote every driver for every motherboard and soundcard is different - what comes out as 9ms on your machine may indeed be 20ms on another machine.

Back to the op's problem

Until you reach mix phase after you have recorded each new track - freeze it and then add a new track - this stops your cpu processing the audio stream for that vst and frees it up for capturing the next lot of data.

Once you have finished recording unfreeze all tracks and begin to work with the audio.
 
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