Live Setup Question – Mac w/ Focusrite Saffire Pro 14

[NuggetWRX]

I’m looking at running SD2 live at a gig through my 13″ Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz 4GB RAM MacBook Pro and I want to reduce latency as much as possible. For personal recording at home I use a simple USB to MIDI cable but that has about 13.4 ms of latency buffering at 256. If I reduce buffering to 128, latency drops to just above 7 ms. I am considering the Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 firewire MIDI interface. If I do, how much will I be able to reduce buffering since the Focusrite will be doing quite a bit of sound card work in the place of my MBP’s built-in CoreAudio drivers fed by USB to MIDI cable from my Roland TD20 module? What I’m shooting for is for latency to be around 2 ms. I’ve heard that 2 ms is almost unnoticeable in a live setting. Will this setup get me to where I need to be without any samples clipping or dropping out in live play?

Thanks,
Jesse

Topic

[Floyd Drummer]

I have just put together a very similar setup. Hate to ask a question when you are looking for an answer, but have you been able to get SD2 running well with your TD20? Did you have to do much tweaking? Mine works decent, but it is not as responsive as I would like and the HiHat seems 2 dimentional (Open and closed).

Just wondering if you had a thought or two

[NuggetWRX]

No it’s no problem. I did a factory reset on my TD20 as soon as I plugged it into SD2 for the first time which took care of a lot of the trigger and sensitivity problems. I’m not actually running Roland drums, I’m endorsed by Jobeky drums out of the UK and they work fantastically with these samples. The only tweaking I had to do was the hi-hat offset on the TD20 to get it to work right with SD2. So when I play through SD2 I just listen to those samples, I don’t bother with the TD20 samples because the hi-hat would sound wrong with module sounds, but works fine with SD2 sounds.

I’m going to see if I can use 128 sampling rate and a USB-MIDI cable to get latency down to 7 ms and if that is far enough, I won’t buy the Focusrite interface. But if it’s still very noticeable and messes me up on time and beat, then I’ll invest in the Focusrite and see how much lower I can get latency down using that sound card rather than built in core audio drivers on my Mac.

[Author]

Replies