ASIO4ALL

[starfugger]

ever heard of it?  they say it decreases latency dramatically.  anyone here ever tried it?  thanks.

[3650guy]

i think KitC has mentioned it a couple of times......
over to you KitC   mr. vst....

[skunkyfunk]

Good, but not as good as ASIO supported interfaces.  Still can't get <2ms latency on ASIO4ALL with crappy soundcards...

[KitC]

Asio4all is merely a wrapper that makes WDM drivers appear as asio to an audio application. Some older soundcards only have wdm drivers and asio4all was developed to enable them to be used with asio apps like Cubase and Nuendo. With some cards, wdm drivers sometimes allow lower latencies than their asio equivalents.

[starfugger]

hey thanks guys.  i was wondering if it can help my setup even more. or at least make a Php 350 sound card work well with midi

[KitC]

hey thanks guys.  i was wondering if it can help my setup even more. or at least make a Php 350 sound card work well with midi

Midi works on a directsound driver separate from wdm/asio. If your intention is to have this Php 350 card work at low latencies for audio, you will often find mixed performance. Midi playback will usually be fine if and only if the midi synth hardware is embedded on a chip on the card. Usually those cheap sounding FM synths or small-size wavetable synths that load into your pc's ram will have very good playback latencies.

Note that I said playback because often, the drivers for these cheap cards are optimized for windows sound playback only and not anything else. If you intend to use them for softsynth playback and audio recording, you might find their performance wanting since they will be transferring a large part of the audio processing to the cpu. That's why you usually get better performance from high end soundcards, aside from better written and optimized drivers, their onboard dsp offloads audio processing from the computer's processor.

[starfugger]

thanks Kit.  am still looking around for a good/cheap soundcard for MIDI and sampling.

[KitC]

Hazel,

What kind of sampling do you intend to do? Do you need something that can playback whatever you sample? Then, maybe it's not a soundcard you need but maybe sampling software.

For example, I learned about sample manipulation and soundfonts using a soundblaster. Once I converted a wave to a soundfont, it was fairly easy to manipulate but sound mangling tools were missing in most soundfont tools available. The best tool, for me, to manipulate and mangle a sound was Kontakt. I could drag a soundfont into Kontakt and just play it. I could layer sounds easily. I could mix and match different sound formats if I wanted to. Kontakt doesn't need a soundblaster, it will work with whatever soundcard you have. You're much better off using your RME to sample anyway.

Recently, I've been using my EmulatorX software and it's filter algorithms are fabulous. The only caveat is that you need Emu hardware to run the software. IMO, all you need is good software since you already have the hardware figured out and the RME's converters are much better than anything you'll find in a 'blaster.

[starfugger]

thanks Kit.  i was planning to setup another pc for this. im really not very familiar with MIDI and sampling but it's one thing i am considering.  instead of getting a keyboard, i think id much rather get a controller and use a smapler. im after realism and sound quality.  what can you recommend? thanks.

[KitC]

thanks Kit.  i was planning to setup another pc for this. im really not very familiar with MIDI and sampling but it's one thing i am considering.  instead of getting a keyboard, i think id much rather get a controller and use a smapler. im after realism and sound quality.  what can you recommend? thanks.

Ever heard of FX Teleport? It allows you to set up a DAW computer farm using ordinary ethernet to communicate between DAWs. I've been studying this system but I'm trying to find out if you'll need a good soundcard for this. AFAIK, all you need are asio drivers and an asio driven application/host and all audio travels thru ethernet cables. Theoretically, the best performance is achieved using gigabit ethernet and several mid-high to high end mobos support this. You could, for instance, have your Cubase in your main pc while the 'slave' contains all the vsts you will want to use. You can even assign the slave pc as an effects processor or distribute softsynth and vst fx processing among several computers.