what the the hell is latency

[Guest PSYN]

could somebody please explain to me what the hell latency is

[Guest jakemyth]

Latency is the lag between audio and midi. That is when u r listening back to your track and the midi is out of time with the audio. U may get things like notes dropping out but mainly mistiming.

 

The best way to overcome this is decrease your samples per buffer settings.

 

Hope this helps

Enjoy

Jake

[Guest Rikard]

Well, that is true what u are saying jakemyth. But when people talk about latency they usually talks about how long time it takes for the sound card to output the signal that is being feed to the input. People who play guitar (or other "real" instruments) often use their soundcard as an effect unit (dist and reverb etc) with VST effects.

So latency of a soundcard is how long time it takes for sound to pass thru it. It takes some time for the audiocard to calculate the A/D conversion and then it has to calculate it back to analogue again. But a soundcard that has good latency usually also has only a short latency when using softsynths like Jakemyth is saying.

[shpongled]

In my opinion when people (people who make electronic music) talk about latency they usually mean ASIO latency ---> when you hit a key from midi keyboard there is a little delay (depending whitch soundcard you have) before you can hear the sound.... BUT... that delay does not happen when you let a computer play midi data......... so if your soundcard's ASIO latency is 125 milliseconds it does NOT mean that a midi track is 125ms behind audio track.... they play at the same time.

 

Good latency is 1-10 milliseconds.

[Guest eXpulse]

actually i have like 10 , but as far as i know, even the professional piano player can't hear latency lower then 20 ms

 

>> jakemyth

no it doesn't work like this , when you play the track in your sequencer it compensates the latency , so there is no delay between midi and audio, or there would be no way to master your track at all and even listen to it...

 

In simple words Shpongled right , latency is the delay between you hit the key on your keyboard and when you can actually hear the sound ( there is more to it though )

to lower your your latency you should get low-latency sound card , but you can even lower it in Sound Blaster by downloading some ASIO drivers for it ( sound is still gonna be crap), or use Direct Monitoring ( Cubase)