MIDI Latency Issues
Can anyone help with latency issues within ‘N’? I have tried EVERYTHING to help improve it but cannot get it to be functional. What is odd, is that programs like REASON work just fine.
Any help would be appreciated.
If you can give some details it might help people to make suggestions…
What do you mean by latency? There a number of different uses for this word in audio/midi/recording/playback etc.
What are you trying to do and how are you going about it?
What is in you setup? PC, soundcard, drivers etc.
Rich
My definition of Latency is the delay in which a midi sound is heard when triggered from a midi device, such as a keyboard or drum pad controller.
My goal is to create realistic drum tracks in an efficient manner. I have a p4 machine, m-audio sound card and delta 44 break-out box, coupled with a midiman 2X2 USB midi I/O.
For the midi drum portion, I do a couple fo different things. Lately, because of the issue, I write out all the drum parts by hand in the piano roll. What I would like to do is utilize a drum module plug-in that is triggered either by my midi keyboard controller or, better yet, by my Roland SPD-6 Drum Pad. The problem however is that when that setup is used in N-Track, the Latency is so severe that you can’t even play along with the metronome. Make sense?
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With N-track I’ve noticed the only way to get low USB midi latency (zero latency just isn’t possible with USB interfaces in Ntrack…I’ve battled this forever and went firewire after much freaking out, and it put a stop to all that) is to use ASIO drivers and use very light buffering settings. This should work better but can be a real pain if you also record audio in Ntrack using WDM drivers with a high buffering setting or the like (you’ll have to switch back and forth your settings whenever you go from audio to midi to get the best performance out of both worlds basicly, and that gets annoying). But yeah, with midi in Ntrack…Low buffering setting, and asio drivers in the soundcard selection box. 
i have tried all configurations. do you suggest one over the other?
It seems to work better with Direct Sound rather than MME, can you explain what that is and why just so I’m sure that I understand.
Thanks
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Ok. This is where I get a little confused, for no other reason than mis-education.
The only other optiona besides midi mapper that comes up is Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth, which I assume thats the on-board midi sounds within my machine? And the USB Midiman 2X2.
Does this mean that this is where N-Track is drawing the midi sounds from.
It doesn’t allow you to select an “M-audio” or “midiman” midi path? I’m thinking it should…but this is a bit difficult to pinpoint via internet. Hmm…(deep in thought).
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In MIDI it gives the following:
Input
In-A USB Midisport 2x2
In-B USB Midisport 2x2
MPU-401 (no idea what this is)
Output
2 - MIDI MAPPER
1 - Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth
3 - Out-A USB Midisport 2x2
4 - Out-B USB Midisport 2x2
5 - MPU-401
I get MIDI sound only when the GS Wavetable or MIDI MAPPER are selected. On the other hand, if I utilize only the WDM or ASIO Audio drivers then I cannot use MIDI at all.
Thanks again, this is good stuff
i actually just took my SBLive out. I thought it was the problem. I never saw any different options in MIDI with the SB installed though, so I wonder if I did something wrong there
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now that you mention it, i did see those at one point. and you may be right. i may totally going about this wrong. am I on the right track doing drum programming this way or is there an easier, or at least more efficient approach?
thanks again
cool. thanks again for all the help. good night
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What Ali said. Good stuff.
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| Output 2 - MIDI MAPPER 1 - Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth 3 - Out-A USB Midisport 2x2 4 - Out-B USB Midisport 2x2 5 - MPU-401 |
But, let’s backtrack a little.
The only output in the list that makes sound on its own is 1 - Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth. The MIDI MAPPER is just a helper built into Windows. It’s the default MIDI device. It will always point to one of the other devices in the list. By what you mention it’s pointing to the Microsoft GSWSW Synth. Select any other and you’ll get silence unless you have an external MIDI module hooked up.
Since the only synth you have is a software synth you are hearing latency caused by that. All software synth have some latency and some are worse than others. The MS Synth is good as a default device if you have nothing else for most MIDI playback but it’s not good for our use in a recording scenario. It can be used, but the latency is in the 85 to 150 millisecond department at best. It can be higher sometimes.
I suggest sticking the SB Live back in there to use as nothing more than the MIDI Synth it has. There is virtually no latency associated with it (not enough to matter).
There may be some difference in USB and non-USB, but there shouldn’t be enough to matter.