Hey guys,

Ive recently began to work with my korg triton keyboard again, and thought id use it with my pc as midi( i use cakewalk sonar 7).

My issue is that i get the famous high latency, wich isnt really usable. I heard the asio4all driver should somehow fix it, but it doesnt seem to work with my soundcard ( Realtek Hd Audio)
+ i run windows Vista 32 bit.

So my question is if anyone know any good soundcards that works with the Asio4all drivers, and produce low latency inputs, or any other kind of solution?

Cheers

Sigge

Realtek HD Audio is the worst audio device possible. I have it with my motherboard and recording was totally impossible with it. So i bought "Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty" which has a great front panel for connecting line-in and midi devices.

Using Asio4All driver gives me almost no latency in values (12ms) and to your ear it's no latency at all.

I know people at GMC use all kind of sound cards so they will post their suggestions here. When buying a sound card make sure it is ASIO compatible

Aha, so realtek is a useless...thought so!

12 ms is really nice I better go get myself a new soundcard then, thx for the info.

Sigge

Realtek is actually good - but the HD series are bad

If I may add,audio card only offers you to set latency/buffer size
but CPU and RAM are those who suffer.

Lower latency means higher buffer and more job for CPU and RAM,am I right guys?

Never had problems with that actually Dunno....

Well,lets say you have 5 VSTs and 10 audio tracks in song,playing all together.
Change latency and you'll see difference in CPU usage bar(in Cubase far left on transport bar).

Muris is right. Sound card is important. That Realtek soundcard is pathetic to be honest. Pretty much anything is better but if you have a lower latency it ups the CPU usage dramatically and also the more tracks you want the more it ups it again so you really need a Dual Core processor to be honest realistically for recording properly.

I work quite nice with 2.8 Ghz and 2 GB Ram,
sometimes I have more then 20 audio tracks and tons of VSTs/plug-ins.
And here's what I do,a small trick.
When I need real time record monitoring,usually when playing Midi keys with sound from HD,
I set latency at about 20msec which is more than enough to play without disturbing.
But as soon as I record it a switch latency up to 60-70msec to make it easy on CPU.

I have a song in progress with around 16 tracks - filled with VSTi but never had any problems - i have DualCore 2.13 processor and 2Gigs of RAM.

Also - my sound card has built in 128MB of RAM.

I'm not talking about problems Pavel but about what is related to latency.

Today everybody has a computer powerful enough for some basic recording - and even beyond that so i think the sound card is the issue in 98% of cases

An eksternal "soundcards" with FireWire will also take the pressure of a CPU i guess?

Yeah I do the same thing when I do recording. Your processor should be plenty. Some of our tracks have over 40 layers so we need a big processor however and each of these tracks may have different plug ins being used and it can get crazy but now we have a quad core for recording

I recommend the Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty also for recording as well with Pavel

Well I guess so.
If you want to hear all efxs from track/channel while recording in "real" time
than it has to be processed by CPU.

Thanks for all the info guys,

I'm gonna hit the local musicstore and have a chat with em, price does matter as well

I'm also gonna have to buy a new mic for recording both vocals and guitar...

(Grabs he's wallet..oh noooo)

Cheers

Good luck with you gear quest,hope you'll get something nice and not too expensive tho!!!!

Thanks

Oh no. That was bad news Pavel. I just bought a computer with Realtek HD on for my daugter and she will surely use it for audio tools too

No worries man, just buy a cheap Audigy SE soundcard and it will do the job for a while. Generally you need a better sound card, and you can find it today for ~100e even.