Ableton Forum

Okay, I'm going crazy here... I am ready to throw my PC out the window. Suddenly out of nowhere I am getting crazy latency delays when playing VST instruments.. It was never like this until now. I'm using an Audiophile 24/96 and am using the ASIO drivers set at 256 samples (6ms latency).

But when I'm playing instruments the latency is way bigger than 6ms! It is probably half a second. I have tried re-installing the drivers, re-installing windows, I've tried tweaking every possible setting in the M-Audio control panel but I am not getting anywhere. I have tried with 3 different midi keyboards and controllers and it is the same thing (so it's not my controller). I definitely have the ASIO driver picked in the preferences of LIVE as well. And in there it even tells me I should be getting 6ms + 6ms = 12ms latency. I even tried setting it to 64 samples (2ms latency) and it made no difference.

could my soundcard just suddenly be not working right? What other causes for latency are there? If someone has any tips let me know please !

It is especially bad when using Steinberg's The Grand piano VST

my cpu is athlon xp 1600+ and 768mb ram... cpu and ram are definitely not even close to maxed out

thanks

first, only half of your latency formula will be relevant, as in this scenario, you have no audio "coming in", just "going out". so as you point out you might be expecting 6ms, but really the overhead in generating the sound to go to the outputs makes that optomistic.

the thing about VSTi is that their performance is determined by the processing resources of your machine. The CPU loading reflected in live is for the audio engine ONLY and won't reflect a wider problem.

my guess is there is some process running on your computer (maybe even a virus as you said "out of nowhere") that is slowing everything down.

if you're on XP or 2000, open the task manager by ctrl + alt + del and switch to Performance. How does your CPU and RAM look?

mp

Ok I'm getting closer to finding the problem... I think it has to do with memory

I have 768mb of ram and I set the virtual memory to have no pagefile and yet it seems EVERYTHING is getting loaded into the pagefile

Under PF Usage in task manager (win xp) it is 320 mb. Looks like all my instruments are getting loaded into virtual memory instead of RAM... why???

The latency seems to occur with memory heavy instruments and not CPU heavy ones so this makes sense

So the next question, why is everything getting loaded into virutal memory when I have almost 768mb of RAM free?!?!

personally I'd take your windows memory management back to it's defaults. I don't quite understand why you'd have no pagefile. The only speed enhancing technique I've seen is to set the pagefile at some amount (usually a factor of how much RAM you're carrying), but never ever remove it completely.

as an aside, take care with the myriad of "suggestions" for improving windows performance. at the end of the day, windows xp is pretty good at sorting itself out, and you should really only dip into the more complicated adjustments if you know exactly what you're doing.

try that and post your result.

MP

the whole pagefile tweak only really works best under older Windows version, like 95, 98, and 98se. w2k and xp do not get a boost in performance by tweaking the pagefile.