Need Help With Midi -> Usb On Pc MIDI Audio recording

[rob86 2]

I'm having trouble connecting my MIDI stuff to my computer. I've never used MIDI before. I have an E-mu MIDI-USB interface. It got decent reviews saying it worked latency free but it is the cheapest midi/usb interface I could find. I've tried two things (Yamaha PSR Keyboard, Yamaha Electronic Drums) and both have very bad latency. I've tried on two computers, one an older AMD ATHLON 3200 processor and one a newer Quad-Core. Both have similarily bad latency. I'll play a pre-recorded drum track on either the PSR keyboard or the Drums to test it and it will sound completely unrecognizable when played back live (or recorded) in FL Studio. I thought I was supposed to adjust the buffer but even at the maximum setting (in millisecond) it was unrecognizable. It seems to work ok (with acceptable latency) when playing slower stuff (playing a chord or a few notes on keyboard) but faster stuff like a full piano song or drum track is unintelligible, out of time noise.Any advice? Surely one of my computers if not both should be enough to handle recording a simple track?

[mrdee 1]

Could you explain what sound card your PCs use, apart from the Emu MIDI interface?Also, what model MIDI interface is it?The latency could be due to your sound card itself.Does it have ASIO drivers?Are you using USB 1.xx or 2.0?Please provide a bit more information about your PC and the interface and it might be possible to give you some help to get the latency down.

[Iniyila 2]

first of all have you monitored your cpu usage ? if the cpu usage is too high then probably its the problem. if you are using windows vista or seven i will suggest you switching back to win xp, you will get better performance in it. but anyway in vista or 7 you can turn off aero and switch to classic theme and see if you got any improvement. anyway your latency will not ever get to zero because you are using usb+windows which means you can never get real time but you can reduce it below 10ms if you have a E-MU 0404. anyway update your driver and firmware to the latest one and work in windows xp with all features turned off then even with your first pc you shouldn't have any latency above 20ms.

[mrdee 1]

That's what I thought too, about the latency using an E-MU, they are usually very good for that.The thing is, I use Windows 7 Ultimate and Cubase 5, and I have a low latency, not even using an E-MU, I simply use my M-AUDIO Audiophile 2496.But it would indeed help to see if there are newer drivers, if there are, that could already solve quite a bit of the problem.I don't use a "state of the art" PC, and it still works.I have a Packard Bell PC with 2.2GHz Intel-Celeron 1500, 2 Gb RAM (which will be updated to 4 Gb soon), and like I said, my M-Audio sound card.I never had any issues using the ASIO driver, my latency sometimes even went as low as 6 ms.I would also start with trying to update the drivers and then take it from there.