I have a P4 3Ghz, with 512mb RAM and a Soundblaster Audigy 2 (the standard one that came with the PC).My sequencer is FL Studio 6

After a break from having a MIDI keyboard I finally purchased one again and as soon as I hooked it up I was reminded of how annoying latency is.

I don't seem to be able to lower it enough so that I can actually play melodies and record them into FL the way it should i.e. in time with the metronome or the song.

Is an upgrade to the soundcard the first step (again it's an Audigy 2, but a standard one that came with a lot of Dell PCs), or should I look towards upgrading my RAM or even my whole PC?

Its not your ram or CPU, latency is a soundcard issue.

It could be your ASIO drivers infact. Not sure what the audigy ones are like but you could try using ones like Asio4All. Make sure you adjust the latency buffer inside your host too. It might be set too high.

http://www.asio4all.com/

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The Creative ASIO driver isn't that bad actually. I can run Reason at 5-10ms latency. Make sure you got the correct driver and that its setup properly.

I downloaded Asio4All from the link provided, thanks Axo!

I installed it and the response is much better. I am not very well versed in Asio drivers, but I will do some research to make sure it's set up as well as it can be and that I can't get even better performance.

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated.

AQ

your audigy card should be fine. some sound cards actually have a latency adjustment just like the asio4all driver, but if yours doesn't have that then adjust the hardware buffer settings. basically, the higher your buffer the higher the latency but your cpu will run just a tad smoother when mixing. i usually leave my buffer at 256 samples, giving me around 5-6ms latency in and out (so 10-12ms latency total).

Yeah 10ms is usually the minimum for being able to play and not notice it. What I usually do to record all my melodies and hooks with a low setting (256 samples) and then when I start adding fx/mixing down, I increase the buffer size so that there are no stutters and pauses in the playback. I sometimes go as high as 768 samples later on in the process which increases latency, but improves playback a bit. Its not a huge performace boost, but it helps squeeze just that last bit of juice out of my card.

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