Ableton Forum

I have to set samples for output up to close to 1024 on output with the above settings before anything plays cleanly using a drumrack and various instruments within the rack (different kits, etc...). Does the same from within Analog drum kits. Adjusting below gets noisy and indistinguishable. Once I crank the buffers up to around 1024 things smooth out ok. I am not running any ASIO drivers.

System specs:
Abit IP35 Pro mobo w/E8400 CPU 3.0Ghz
2GB DDR2-800
RAID 1 dual SATA II 640GB
Realtek HD onboard audio
XFX 8800 GT 512MB video
300GB IDE internal HDD.
XP Pro SP3

If smaller audio buffers for mme/directx are working depends mainly on the soundcard driver.
However, mme/directx will always add an extra latency that can be up to 30ms (independent of the buffer size you can set up in the audio preferences)

If you want to achieve smaller latencies we strongly recommend to use an ASIO capable audio interface.

Regards
/Alex