GSi VB3 question

[AdmiralQuality]

Well I'm looking at these here

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2
TASCAM US-200

Both good brands. I'm sure either will work just fine and have nice low latency. I'd probably go for the Focusrite, but that's just on reputation, haven't tried either of them myself.

Yeah I'm leaning more to the Focusrite too bad you have to move up one model to get the one with the multiple LED audio meters but no big deal.

Hopefully it will work well on a i3 dual core laptop that's 2.3 Ghz I'm hoping for sub 10 ms times.. I can't remember what I had on my desktop setup.. I want to say it was 13-15 ms

I get 3 ms (96 sample) output latency on my 10 year old Edirol UA-1000.

That's on Windows with the ASIO driver. I can also get the WDM driver mode down to 64 samples in Reaper. On OSX I can get it down to 64 in all hosts I've tried.

I'm sure the Focusrite gets down there too.

[MikeCL]

That would be great if I can get down that low, one other thing you said you use reaper which I have but I haven't in a few months now but how can you get VB3 and Absynth to work in reaper if that's possible? Because I think absynth is a standalone?

[AdmiralQuality]

That would be great if I can get down that low, one other thing you said you use reaper which I have but I haven't in a few months now but how can you get VB3 and Absynth to work in reaper if that's possible? Because I think absynth is a standalone?

Reaper is a fully functioning host. Evaluation is free and fully functioning, try it. http://reaper.fm

I use lots of other hosts too (part of my job as a developer, gotta test in them all) but Reaper is my go-to host for recording and running live instruments these days.

Absynth comes in plug-in form (at least it did last time I checked).

[MikeCL]

yeah I used Reaper before but I cleaned out my whole system but just haven't put it on again, but yeah I see it says absynth 5 supports VST, How quick is it to switch back and forth between that and VB3? I assume I do it with a program change?

[AdmiralQuality]

yeah I used Reaper before but I cleaned out my whole system but just haven't put it on again, but yeah I see it says absynth 5 supports VST, How quick is it to switch back and forth between that and VB3? I assume I do it with a program change?

They can both run at the same time, actually.

Typically you'd target your controller to a different instrument by changing the MIDI channel your controller is sending on. Some hosts might provide functions to help automate this. Your controller(s) probably also have programs you can set up to quickly switch this.

For example, when I'm playing that rig above with VB3, the top manual is sending on Channel 1 and the bottom is sending on Channel 2 (the Korg CX-3 is nice enough to offer a feature to merge the lower MIDI input with the top, otherwise you'll need 2 MIDI interfaces (with 2 MIDI inputs) on your DAW to handle input from 2 keyboards (OR a MIDI-merge box).

Say, if I wanted to add pedals, I'd have to either add another MIDI interface to my machine, or get a box to merge its MIDI out into the MIDI out of the other keyboard controllers.

[MikeCL]

yeah I used Reaper before but I cleaned out my whole system but just haven't put it on again, but yeah I see it says absynth 5 supports VST, How quick is it to switch back and forth between that and VB3? I assume I do it with a program change?

They can both run at the same time, actually.

Typically you'd target your controller to a different instrument by changing the MIDI channel your controller is sending on. Some hosts might provide functions to help automate this. Your controller(s) probably also have programs you can set up to quickly switch this.

For example, when I'm playing that rig above with VB3, the top manual is sending on Channel 1 and the bottom is sending on Channel 2 (the Korg CX-3 is nice enough to offer a feature to merge the lower MIDI input with the top, otherwise you'll need 2 MIDI interfaces (with 2 MIDI inputs) on your DAW to handle input from 2 keyboards (OR a MIDI-merge box).

Say, if I wanted to add pedals, I'd have to either add another MIDI interface to my machine, or get a box to merge its MIDI out into the MIDI out of the other keyboard controllers.

Well see the thing is I will just only have one keyboard so I don't think I have to worry much about channels at the moment.

[AdmiralQuality]

yeah I used Reaper before but I cleaned out my whole system but just haven't put it on again, but yeah I see it says absynth 5 supports VST, How quick is it to switch back and forth between that and VB3? I assume I do it with a program change?

They can both run at the same time, actually.

Typically you'd target your controller to a different instrument by changing the MIDI channel your controller is sending on. Some hosts might provide functions to help automate this. Your controller(s) probably also have programs you can set up to quickly switch this.

For example, when I'm playing that rig above with VB3, the top manual is sending on Channel 1 and the bottom is sending on Channel 2 (the Korg CX-3 is nice enough to offer a feature to merge the lower MIDI input with the top, otherwise you'll need 2 MIDI interfaces (with 2 MIDI inputs) on your DAW to handle input from 2 keyboards (OR a MIDI-merge box).

Say, if I wanted to add pedals, I'd have to either add another MIDI interface to my machine, or get a box to merge its MIDI out into the MIDI out of the other keyboard controllers.

Well see the thing is I will just only have one keyboard so I don't think I have to worry much about channels at the moment.

Oh, they still come up. Say you want to play a split with one instrument on one half of the keyboard. Different MIDI channels are what you use to differentiate the halves.

And again, it's how you move from controlling one instrument on one track to a completely unrelated instrument on another track. Program change is for changing programs ON ONE INSTRUMENT. Channels are what you'd change for switching from one instrument to an entirely different instrument. (And again, your controller probably lets you set it up so this is as quick as the press of a button.)

[MikeCL]

Ah thanks for clearing that up then, so it looks like I have to do key splits or just end up getting another keyboard to go with it.

[nix808]

http://www.korg.com/nanoseries2

I am the suckiest keyboard player on earth,
But I have a 60 key Korg,
and one of these, the Keys version to play bass on.
It's a an option.

[MikeCL]

http://www.korg.com/nanoseries2

I am the suckiest keyboard player on earth,
But I have a 60 key Korg,
and one of these, the Keys version to play bass on.
It's a an option.

Haha nice if it's just home use but I'm not too sure I would trust that using a foot

[AdmiralQuality]

Ah thanks for clearing that up then, so it looks like I have to do key splits or just end up getting another keyboard to go with it.

Splits, or you can switch between instruments by having your controller change the MIDI channel its sending on.

[MikeCL]

Ah thanks for clearing that up then, so it looks like I have to do key splits or just end up getting another keyboard to go with it.

Splits, or you can switch between instruments by having your controller change the MIDI channel its sending on.

Hmm I will have to read up on the controller change for the keyboard I'm looking at, also looks like I still had reaper still installed I have it open right now, I ended up installing absynth and I see the VSt as well.

I'm stuck using this behringer UCA202 I can't get the latency under 18 ms any lower my notes don't sound and I get a "ticking sound" on any note played.

I hope that focusrite is better, for the time being I can use the UCA202 to hook to my sound system.

[AdmiralQuality]

Ah thanks for clearing that up then, so it looks like I have to do key splits or just end up getting another keyboard to go with it.

Splits, or you can switch between instruments by having your controller change the MIDI channel its sending on.

Hmm I will have to read up on the controller change for the keyboard I'm looking at, also looks like I still had reaper still installed I have it open right now, I ended up installing absynth and I see the VSt as well.

I'm stuck using this behringer UCA202 I can't get the latency under 18 ms any lower my notes don't sound and I get a "ticking sound" on any note played.

I hope that focusrite is better, for the time being I can use the UCA202 to hook to my sound system.

You've got the Behringer's ASIO driver selected in Reaper's Audio | Device preferences? Does it come with some kind of control panel app for adjusting latency?

You might also want to try "WDM Kernel Streaming" in Reaper which works great for me and allows me 64 sample latency where my ASIO driver only goes down to 96.

And clicks can either be from an overtaxed CPU (too many plugins) or system configuration issues. (Even stuff you can't change like USB and Firewire chipsets can have a big effect here. Sometimes all you can do is get a new computer.) Do you get clicking when you're not using any plug-ins? I.e. just running unaffected input back to the output?

[MikeCL]

Ah thanks for clearing that up then, so it looks like I have to do key splits or just end up getting another keyboard to go with it.

Splits, or you can switch between instruments by having your controller change the MIDI channel its sending on.

Hmm I will have to read up on the controller change for the keyboard I'm looking at, also looks like I still had reaper still installed I have it open right now, I ended up installing absynth and I see the VSt as well.

I'm stuck using this behringer UCA202 I can't get the latency under 18 ms any lower my notes don't sound and I get a "ticking sound" on any note played.

I hope that focusrite is better, for the time being I can use the UCA202 to hook to my sound system.

You've got the Behringer's ASIO driver selected in Reaper's Audio | Device preferences? Does it come with some kind of control panel app for adjusting latency?

You might also want to try "WDM Kernel Streaming" in Reaper which works great for me and allows me 64 sample latency where my ASIO driver only goes down to 96.

And clicks can either be from an overtaxed CPU (too many plugins) or system configuration issues. (Even stuff you can't change like USB and Firewire chipsets can have a big effect here. Sometimes all you can do is get a new computer.) Do you get clicking when you're not using any plug-ins? I.e. just running unaffected input back to the output?

Yes it comes with a control window that lets you adjust it, if I change it from fast to rapid that's when the clicking happens and my CPU usage is only 9% and that's just with the standalone absynth window open, as you can see in the screen shot changing it to fast gives me 22 ms which is pretty high.

This is a new computer this is the one I used at the start of this thread, I ended up wanting to do a more compact setup so I'm going to get a laptop for that job.

When doing nothing I still hear it making the sound regardless if any key is pressed or not..

I made a video to hopefully make it a bit more clearer, a little tired but hope it helps lol

[AdmiralQuality]

Wow, what lousy interface (using terms like "rapid" instead of showing meaningful values).

First thing I find odd is that there's a 32 bit mode. Try changing it to 24 and see if it makes a difference. Audio is always 24 bit, there's no such thing as 32 bit digitizers. (It's probably referring to padding the data with an extra byte of nothing, which can help in some cases. But let's try it turned to 24 and see if that makes a difference.)

The other thing I see there is an Application Priority dropdown with "normal" selected. You might try turning that up to whatever the higher settings are.

Also I'm surprised you can make these changes on the fly. Usually you'd expect to need to restart the host after changing things like driver latency.

Does the popping still happen even when no instrument is loaded?

Oh wait, is this Absynth in standalone mode? Don't use it that way, use it plugged in to a proper host like Reaper. A lot of standalones don't work very well.