DFD Buffer size question

[McGurk]

Hello,

I had a quick question about setting you're DFD buffer size. I'm having a little bit of latency when recording. My midi recordings seems to get off set by about an 8th note.

I was wondering what would be a good buffer size setting to help with latency and not have drop outs in sound. I've played around a little bit with some of the buffer size settings, but don't really know what I'm doing, I'm new to using the EW stuff, so I thought I'd ask :) (maybe the buffer size setting isn't my problem here?)

I did increase the voices to 248 like it said during installation, my audio card is a creative SB-X-FI I'm running a duo core pentium 4, 2.6 ghz with 2.5gb of ram. Using cubase. (man I wish I had a quad core with more ram)

[Jacob Falling]

Welcome to the forums, McGurk

You might want to wish for a new sound card first. Better drivers will probably net you more of a latency improvement than anything else at this point--and will also be transferable to a new PC later with those quad cores and ram.

If playing around with the settings doesn't help you, maybe try tech support.... make sure you mention which EW software you're using, whether you've downloaded all the relevant patches, and if your SB drivers are up-to-date.

[McGurk]

Thanks for the reply, I've got all the correct updates/drivers for my sound card and the EW programs, I'm using the composer bundle which is the following;

RA
gold pro
symphonic chiors
colossus
bonsendorfer
storm drum
pervussive adventures 2

I was leaning towards the audio card being my problem but wanted to make sure beefore running out to purchase one.

[Pietro]

Make sure you are using ASIO drivers made by your soundcard manufacturer, not the ASIO Multimedia Driver or something like that.

I didn't have any problems using X-Fi Music soundcard, with latency = 20ms.

The first thing is not a DFD settings problem, but the second (drop out) is - check the FAQ section for DFD advice.

- Piotr

[bobbyem]

May be late in the game, but alot of cubase users have the problem with timing with midi in cubase. I for one have it. All my inputed midi is one 16th note to fast.

The value is said to differ for other users. SOS has an article on the subject, but the only thing the article covers is how to find out what what that value is. And that there really isnt any good way to fix it...

(I was looking into DFD and this post came up so :) )

[pinkster]

Try finding a settings/options or any alike(differs) possibility inside your soundcards own settings. You should be able (I hope also for X-Fi) to set the audio latency usually like this. That can be able to set also inside a hosts (like sequencer's) device settings.
To set too much buffer the latency similarily increases. On the other hand trying to push too much latency out of a medium level card you get dropouts. If you don't find things yourself, contact Creative tech.
Here you have something to start with: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan05/articles/pcmusician.htm


Hope you succeed :)

[Vatroslav]

May be late in the game, but alot of cubase users have the problem with timing with midi in cubase. I for one have it. All my inputed midi is one 16th note to fast.

The value is said to differ for other users. SOS has an article on the subject, but the only thing the article covers is how to find out what what that value is. And that there really isnt any good way to fix it...

(I was looking into DFD and this post came up so :) )

It's a known issue with SX3. That's why I use SX2 now on x64.

I was lucky with Nuendo 3 to have solved this with Use System Timestamp, but for many, that didn't do the trick.

Still, it reportedly happens with other DAWs too.

It's very likely to be an OS/driver issue.

But I haven't seen reports on this happening with SX2 regardless of the soundcard/OS combination.

This isn't related to latency.

Do you have the latest SX3 version installed?

[Pietro]

I use Cubase 4 Studio, and setting "Use System Timestamp" at MIDI port setup (in Device Setup) simply does the trick. One click and no more problems.

- Piotr