SoundMax 4 on Intel PERL

[Gix]

Hi!
I must tell that this driver is fantastic.
I used it in Sonar 4. The previous version (1.8) didn't work for input but this release (2.1) is working.
The native WDM driver of SoundMax (version 5.12.1.3713 - the newer one is very slow) gives 10 ms of latency using softsynths. If I used it for realtime playing of Guitar Rig I was forced to reduce the samples in order to obtain a better latency but this caused softsynths to stop working properly.
Now, using ASIO4ALL, I can play with almost instant result!! Sonar says 2.7 ms latency but I don't know if it's true, anyway Sonar is much responsive when playing Guitar Rig and other softsynths are working OK too.

But there are some softwares causing problems, like Arturia Stand Alone Player. It crashes and sometimes it disables the input.
Good work!!

[Michael Tippach]

I've done some latency tests with Soundmax only about one hour ago. If you have "Hardware Buffer" enabled, and input/output latency compensation set to "0" samples, the actual round trip latency still is about half a millisecond _less_ than what is reported!

With h/w buffer off, reported and actual latency just about match.

The WDM KS interface in Sonar seems to be build around so called "WaveCyclic" miniports, i.e. They would use buffer sizes of 441 Samples at 44.1Khz and 480 Samples at 48kHz in order to exactly match 10ms each way. With a WaveCyclic miniport, there are certain advantages with this, but your round trip latency will never be less than at least 20ms! ASIO4ALL is a little more "aggressive". Besides, the SoundMax WDM driver is _not_ a WaveCyclic miniport.

I've done some more work WRT a SoundMax issue, so may be the next version will even fix the occasional crash you are experiencing.

Thanks,

Mike

[Gix]

So far in Sonar is working OK.
Yes, I enabled hardware buffer (in version 2.0 it didn't work) and "0" samples.
The problems arise only with Arturia synths using their Standalone player (i.e. without Sonar as host).
BTW, do you know which WDM driver seems the best for Soundmax? There are a lot of versions from 3660 to 5243. I noticed that the latest versions for Intel MBs (ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/software/ias/Audio_XP2K_5.12.1.5240_IAS_prod.exe) are very slow in Sonar, even if you can set 10 ms latency you can't play anything with this. And it is so fool that reports 4 output channels instead of 3...