Hi,
I just started producing with FLStudio and I'm having trouble recording from my keyboard.

Right now, I have my keyboard connected to my computer through a Midiman USB 1x1 cable. A cheap $20 cable, that has a midi plug on one end and a usb plug on the other.

Except, that whenever I press a key on the keyboard, the computer is always late in playing it back, making it almost impossible to play in-tempo.

What I would really like is to be able to play cool sounds straight from the keyboard, cause that's what I'm used to as a pianist.

Can anyone help me get started?

PS: Someone said I need a special sound card for this..is this true? I'm on a laptop, so upgrading a sound card is not the easiest thing in the world.

what soundcard do you currently have?

if you have a *really* shit soundcard your cpu needs to buffer samples in advance. the size of the buffer determines how big the lag is. if your cpu is under heavy load or it has to crunch alot of sounds at once you'll have to increase the buffer size, on an end of the line track in floops where the cpu load is hitting 100%, im on 371ms latency. impossible to play live with that. so thats what ASIO is for. ASIO drivers let you operate at pretty low latencies under the same cpu load than just buffering it. typically 5 to 30ms. even creative audigys support ASIO although their ASIO drivers last time i heard were pretty bad. i dont really like m-audio's ASIO drivers either because when im up at 90% to 100% cpu load and im using ASIO it locks up my PC pretty bad. but yea, you need a soundcard that supports ASIO. you should check what soundcard you got first though cuz you may already have one but are using the wrong driver in floop's audio setup page.

quote:

Someone said I need a special sound card for this..is this true? I'm on a laptop, so upgrading a sound card is not the easiest thing in the world.

dont worry, theres plenty of external firewire and USB soundcards ranging from the very cheap budget solutions to the studio in a breakoutbox that will cost you an arm and a leg.

go to "options" and "auidio settings" and try to change the latency there

Thanks for the prompt replies.
Lots of relief on this end to know that I don't have to buy a brand new laptop to get good sound cards.

Anyway, about the buffer size..

does bigger buffer = less lag?

or does bigger buffer = more lag?

Thanks for the prompt replies.
Lots of relief on this end to know that I don't have to buy a brand new laptop to get good sound cards.

Anyway, about the buffer size..

does bigger buffer = less lag?

or does bigger buffer = more lag?

Oh and another thing. I only encounter this lag when I'm playing from my keyboard to the PC. (horrible lag- maybe quarter of a sec). But fruityloops has a feature where you can use the pc keyboard to simulate a real keyboard, and I don't get any lag when I use that. Does this mean anything?