Latency Check

[aeturno]

I just ran a latency check on my system, and I have a couple of questions as to the analysis of this program. I've been using a DPC latency checker from thesycon.

Generally speaking, the process appears to run fine. Though every once in a while, a red bar spikes up between the 2000 and 4000 mark and a message occurs on the bottom saying you may get dropouts, etc... A red bar does not appear to be anything of a commonplace, just once in a while. Does it mean I should check specific devices for problems, were I to install a digital audio workstation? Or is a rare red bar less specific?

As far as streaming audio is concerned, I've found little to no problems. Like, I have no problems streaming from external hard drives or the Internet. The only time I have had problems is when there is a weak signal and the rate of the modem reaches below-average speeds, but I would think that is a totally recognizable event and more or less unrelated to true system latency.

- Ray M -

[BobTheDog]

Hi Ray,

The only way of working out what driver is causing this is to disable devices in device manager one at a time to see which one is causing it.

How often do you see the high reading?

[robsol]

The prime suspect is the built-in wifi device. Go into device manager and start with disabling that, then run the latency checker again.

[aeturno]

There doesn't appear to be any specific pattern to how many times I see the red reading, just that it comes up after a line of green and yellow readings. At times, it will take a fairly good amount of time for another red line to show up. I thought at first it was due to me doing something, like opening MS Word, but then if I let the latency check run on idle, a red line still shows up out of the blue on a relatively rare occasion. I don't even know if I should be doing any thing else with the computer while running this program. Maybe a better check is to run the program as I do other things, or maybe I shouldn't be. Can't find much instructions on it.

As far as wi-fi goes, I turned it off and the same results occurred. There may be a glitch here, though, but I don't know. The computer has a wi-fi switch on the side, which automatically shuts down wi-fi. However, I have no idea as to whether or not the wi-fi driver is still running in the background. If the driver is still running, maybe then I need to use device manager to manually turn it off. I would think the switch would do that, but I don't know.

[blue hell]

[pinealapoptosis]

I have been getting bad popping sounds even when my latency is set very high.

It happens when I have,at the very least,1 external audio source and one vsti running.(ableton live 8 )

I use a tascam us-1641,windows xp.At idle my cpu usage is 0%- 1% with about 124 mgbs ram usage.Processor is a dual core AMD turion 64x2 2.21 ghz.


I never thought about disabling the wireless network adapter in device manager.I figured the external switch did the trick.I will try that tomorrow.

[nobody]

aeturno, can you describe your computer? What CPU? Is this a machine you put together or got factory-built? Etc.

[aeturno]

My machine is a factory-built laptop computer with a dual-core Pentium T2080 processor and approximately 1G SDRAM. It's a Toshiba Satellite A135-S4666.

Note that I am only interested in learning the ropes of electronic music at this point in time, so I'm not interested in exceptional quality yet. I've never really encountered any major problems while streaming audio or video other than when connected with a poor signal. I'm more or less looking at installing some relatively cheap audio workstation, notably Reaper, as well as juggling with a thought of saving money in hopes to buy a relatively cheap hardware synth within the next year. Other than that, that's all my goals are at this point.

- Ray M -

[mosc]