Hd 500 - Options To Lower Latency

[Coercer]

I am sure this question has been answered before, however, after scouring the net and not finding an answer, I figured I'd just ask here. You guys are always great and helpful.

 

I currently record over USB, but my CPU isn't great (Intel Q8300). After adding a few effects, my DAW begins to crackle if I set my latency low enough for it to not mess up my playing. I've used work-arounds, but I'd like to find out if there's another way to reduce latency.

 

One thing I've heard is that people use the S/PDIF Out to record, vs USB. Is there an advantage to this? Would this decrease the latency without racking up more processing power? I've had trouble even finding internal soundcards that support S/PDIF in, and many interfaces that do cost as much (or more) than a new CPU would.

 

Could anyone offer up any advice? I'm certainly a techie, but not an engineer, and all this head scratching is making me go bald.

 

Thank you.

[Rowbi]

USB I think usually uses a little CPU so that's perhaps why people suggested another input method.

 

That's a fairly decent CPU though with a total of 10GHz of CPU. Have you already optimised your operating system to stop anything unnecessary from running and taking up CPU? Google has lots of guides to help on that.

 

Is there anything else on the fx side that you can use only when post processing rather than when playing live? Or bounce a track using lots of plugins to audio to free up CPU? Or course keep the original track too but disabled and not processing fx. That may help.

 

Sorry I don't have more, but I hope this helps

 

Andy

[Coercer]

Thanks for the reply and advice.

 

I have my DAW running on a separate OS on an SSD, to make sure it doesn't get all muddled up. It's mostly optimized to run well.

 

All of your advice is great, and I tend to do a lot of the things you mentioned. Optimizing my plugin use and DAW has really helped to decrease overall CPU usage. Guitar Rig tends to be the biggest culprit in CPU drainage, but I use it sparingly in favor of the POD these days. When I need to use it, I do tend to disable the FX of the tracks that are the biggest offenders.

 

Perhaps I am asking for a little too much out of my system. Having my POD latency sliders all the way down is typically ideal for me. Maybe it's in my head, but even the few milliseconds that are added as I move the slider up tend to be noticeable. When I heard mention of using the S/PDIF out, I thought it may have been the magic answer to permanent low latency (pipe dream!), but your response helps indicate that it's not, and that the methods I am applying are the right ones. It does come as a relief to me. That's another $100 or so I won't have to drop on another piece of tech.

 

Thanks again for the help.

[Rowbi]

No probs. sounds like you're well versed in using a daw. Also you're trusting your ears which is all important. If you hear the latency then you're right to leave the slider low and find a way to make that lower latency workable without crackling.

 

The spdif advice from others may work. Perhaps I didn't explain myself well. USB interrupts do use a bit if CPU and spdif may not. But if you're going to spend a lot on an internal spdif interface then it might be worth getting the upgraded CPU as you mention.

 

Cheers

 

Andy

[panaman]

You didnt mention which soundcard. its always a good idea to try and get an asio driver for your soundchip.

 

you could try to lower the sample frequency, to 44khz rather than 96, cutting the bulk of data being transferred and processed in half.   with both usb and spdif, the data are akready digital and do not need another a-d conversion, which is a major part of latency.  some soundcards allow to use monitoring which is basically a shortcut from in to out.

 

creamware suggests for audio pc usage to disable hyperthreading on the cpu.  while it may be great for number crunching in repetitive tasks (fractals, movie conversion), it seems to slow down others because the pipes have to be preloaded based on predictions. if false, they need to be flushed and reloaded again before processing resumes.

 

so, a few milliseconds can be sqeezed out, but the last one or two will really cost you.

however, with the demise of the old pci bus/slots on newer mainboards, you can watch the prices drop for used pci i/o cards.

my creamware cards come with a nominal latency of 0.5 ms stable , hammerfall with 2 or 3 ms (i think), both not noticeable to me. (latency being counted one way, thus needs to be doubled for in + out routing.

be warned though: the creamware 3 dsp card will only give you basic functionality, you will want the additional one or two pieces of the 6 dsp card to be able to use both the 16 ch mixer, a few effects and the 31 band stereo graphic eq all at the same time (if you have 2 or 3  pci slots free) , or the 18 dsp external rack unit @ 4000 € ... highly addictive and ruining...