trigger io

[booboo12teddy]

Hi all,

Ive been trying to see why when i hit the drum it takes around almost a second delay for ezdrummer to read the trigger. Can anyone help? every time i play it sounds really off and its getting me annoyed. I have a ALesis trigger Io and my laptop is a pc lenovo 310.

Topic

[Scott]

The following is an excerpt from the Toontrack Solo manual regarding latency and sound cards. In a nutshell, make sure you are using a low buffer to reduce latency.

4.2 Audio buffer

Triggering sound sources from a computer system unavoidably create a certain amount of playback latency, however minimal, which is inherent to the processing of data to be sent to the sound system via the Audio interface.

Any computer built in the last 3 years with a dedicated Audio sound card (as opposed to the ‘stock’ or built-in sound hardware) should be able to provide a satisfactory experience at minimal latency but to do so it needs properly written drivers, optimized to ensure information destined to the sound card is processed efficiently.

For this reason we strongly recommend using non generic ASIO/Core Audio drivers for the sound card you intend to use. The best advice we can give you is to purchase a professionally graded sound card and obtain the most up-to-date drivers from the manufacturer. Consumer cards, even if recognized, or outdated drivers for that matter, will unavoidably compromise your experience and enjoyment.

Latency is usually observed as a delay in playback, directly related to the transport of data between your sound card and Toontrack solo. , via your computer’s data bus. Although it can be expressed in milliseconds it is conventional to specify the latency as a buffer value which represent the amount of data processed per processor cycle.

It is usually accepted that a latency under 3 ms cannot be perceptible by the human brain, at least if the flow of information is steady (data ‘jittering’, quite common with USB devices, can have a large impact on perceived latency). At 44.1KHz, the fixed rate operated by Toontrack solo’s audio engine, this corresponds to a buffer value of 128 (samples).

To be complete, this is not the entire latency that needs to be taken into account as the MIDI interface can add to the delay in playback with a more or less dramatic effect. Nonetheless a value of 128 set in the Audio > Latency setting | dialogue should yield an adequate response in most cases.

The drawback of setting a low buffer value however is that this increases the demand on CPU availability and exclusiveness, something that the audio driver is in charge of managing, hence the importance of a non generic and up-to-date driver. CPU resources of the host machine will also limit the minimum value one can expect from a given system and, of course, the more powerful the computer the better.

It should be noted that low latency playback is really only relevant to ‘live’ triggering of instruments. For composing/arranging with the help of EZplayer Pro for example, high buffer values will have little impact and will, in fact, maximize the number of concurrent Drummers a given system is able to play back at the same time.

In summary, and as indicative values, the following should be adequate for the different scenarios outlined above:

Real-Time Triggering: set the Audio buffer between 64 and 256 (samples)
Offline Composing: set Audio buffer between 512 and 2048 (samples)

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Author]

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