Ableton Forum

When using my laptops directx soundcard drivers, all my loops seem to drift out of time, any ideas why (works fine when I use my usb soundcards asio drivers)

Its about time laptop manufacturers sorted it out and got down with the asio boys init

coz they're cheap!

+1

the macbook sound card is better than some but still is not great, although it's useable if you don't have to mic up guitars and vocals etc.

Cheapness is your answer. Most people buying laptops are not into DAW recording. It's always better to buy a dedicated audio interface.

laptops = directx or multimedia

they might be cheap but when the buyer is looking for a laptop for music surely its worth sticking a half decent soundcard in it. init

when I'm laying down a choon, with laptop on lap veged out on sofa I don't really want the usb soundcard balancing on me shoulder or wearing the cable as a belt

its nothing to do with the hardware, they are almost identical on pc/mac laptops.

If you run ASIO4ALL on a pc laptop, youll get the same performance as a built in soundcard under MacOS. DirectX drivers are useless for music.

ASIO4ALL can help with latency on PC laptop cards (which often have no native asio driver).

However, it can't help with the cheap as crap build, poor s/n ratios, bad converters and such that are inherent on such things. They are only designed to play windows sounds through, so no surprise that they are cheap crap.

Not to mention that you cannot record external sound sources unless you have a preamp and that the recorded material is noisier and less transparent sounding than an audio interface.

If you just want to bum about with some sample CDs and have no plans on recording external sources, then the inbuilt card is OK.

People keep repeating this matra about macs built-in soundcard being good ...

Well it's not.

It's actually not awfully good at all. Horribly noisy.

My second laptop (vaio) wins over the mbp hands down.

Parametex wrote:People keep repeating this matra about macs built-in soundcard being good ...

It's actually not awfully good at all. Horribly noisy.

My second laptop (vaio) wins over the mbp hands down.

I don't know if the Mac Book and Mac Book Pro have the same sound card, but I have to agree with you here - the sound card on the MBP is a disgrace. It is extremely noisy and seems to play digital chatter into any silence - even between drum hits. (When you don't play any sound for a couple of seconds, it seems to turn itself off, and you hear real silence.)

I had a G4 powerbook before the MBP - the sound card was *much* better

i use macbook pro and i sounds fine.must be your computers.

I use my Macbook Pro internal soundcard sometimes when I don't want to take with me the RME Multiface (for portability) and it works like a charm, the sound is good enough to rock the place.

I've been very pleasantly surprised by the sound quality on my Vaio. It shows up as SimaTel High Definition Audio CODEC manufacturer IDT; in case that means anything to anybody. It even has it's ASIO drivers, but the latency is poor.

It's a bit misleading to think of laptops as having sound cards though. If you are lucky it will have a separate sound chip, but often it will be just one function of a some multi function device.

Most laptop sound cards are bad because most people don't do anything with laptop sound besides watch movies and listen to iTunes. It's not relevant for the average consumer (which we are not).

Rave wrote:

rewind wrote:

Parametex wrote:People keep repeating this matra about macs built-in soundcard being good ...

It's actually not awfully good at all. Horribly noisy.

My second laptop (vaio) wins over the mbp hands down.

I don't know if the Mac Book and Mac Book Pro have the same sound card, but I have to agree with you here - the sound card on the MBP is a disgrace. It is extremely noisy and seems to play digital chatter into any silence - even between drum hits. (When you don't play any sound for a couple of seconds, it seems to turn itself off, and you hear real silence.)

Right, my MBP soundcard is crap compared with my previous powerbook's and does the same modem-ish noises as you describe... And apparently many of the MBP released last spring have this problem. It's not even the soundcard, it has to do with the motherboad itself, so if it's still under warranty you should have it fixed at an Apple store, because this is not acceptable, I reckon, for such a pricey puter.

bicarbone wrote: Right, my MBP soundcard is crap compared with my previous powerbook's and does the same modem-ish noises as you describe... And apparently many of the MBP released last spring have this problem. It's not even the soundcard, it has to do with the motherboad itself, so if it's still under warranty you should have it fixed at an Apple store, because this is not acceptable, I reckon, for such a pricey puter.

My MBP is no longer under warranty, and I have a shiny new MOTU Ultralite sitting beside me, so I don't really care anymore