Good Progress - Not Good Enough For Drums

[Steven James Burks]

The idea of accessing WDM drivers and utilizing them in a more eficient manner than Microsoft would develop is a long time coming, and more power to you, Michael Tippach.

However, this driver is not yet ready for the big time. Until I can record MIDI drums through my laptop's Realtek AC97 audio card accurately, that is. =)

I notice about a 20 ms latency from the time I strike a pad to the time I hear a note. While to most people's ears this is acceptable, to a professional it is not usable.

Thank you very much for spearheading this project, Michael, and I look forward to subsequent developments and lower latencies.

Regards,

/steven

[Neebo]

Hi Steven, I had a Compaq Evo N800V laptop with a compatible soundcard to yours. Once I removed all the soundcard drivers and only installed the WDM part of the driver (without all the fancy other bits) I could get 3ms latency and believe me it was fast enough to play my Artist Drums VST. Try it.

Regards

Neebo

[Steven James Burks]

Thanks for the response, Neebo.

Can you, or someone else, explain a little more about exactly how to do this and exactly what you mean?

Thank you,

/steven

[Neebo]

Hi Steven,

I will try to explain what I did. First you have to download the latest soundmax driver but you only want the WDM part of the driver package, do not install the whole thing. Once you have the WDM part on your hard disk, go to control panel, Add & remove Programs and get rid of any soundmax drivers already installed on your laptop. I also went to the device manager and in Sound, video and game controllers and right click on the Soundmax soundcard and uninstall it alltogether. Win XP will see the card and prompt to install the driver again. At this point choose to install it from a specific location and point the wizard towards the WDM driver I talked about at the begining.

Good luck.

[Guest]

I guess the option of getting PCMCIA sound card is out of the question? Not sure what low latency cards there are available but certainly there must be..

[Paul]

Can I do the same with my SoundBlaster Live's WDM driver under Windows XP?... I got already 20 ms latency, wich for me, is more than I espected.

[Steven James Burks]

Neebo,

I just gave the tip you mentioned a go ... I see an improvement, but the best latency I can get before buffer underruns take place is about 11ms. This is close, but not quite close enough to use for accurate drumming.

Are there any other special settings you've implemented in the ASIO4All configuration that you might recommend?

Thank you,

/steven

[Neebo]

Hi Steven,

I had the laptop optimised for audio as recommended by many DAW sites. This includes switching to background services instead of programs etc etc. The best latency I got was 3ms. Also I believe if you disable the inputs you get better latency on outputs. Here is a useful article by Sound On Sound www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar02/articles/pcmusician0302.asp

Good Luck

[Jeff]

I have Realtek AC97 in my HP, and play drums (Drumkit from hell, artist, Custom&Vintage, stormdrum) with 1ms and no drop outs. I'm using 1.8v ...

[Jeff]

Using... 1. Via AC'97 Codec Combo Driver (WMD) version 590b
2. Asio4all Version 1.8

1ms midi recording with Sonar 4... while uploading and downloading files in the background. Keyboard USB connected.