Recording music on the PC ...

My computer is 64bit ... but that has nothing to do with performance. It's simply a different architecture - the main difference is that you can use more memory (I have 4GB).

Thanks for bothering though - I really appreciate the effort. I know the Ableton FAQ section, and the bit you posted is not related to my problem, unfortunately.

Are the system requirements for the Toneport really as high as stated? For the Toneport UX1 they are:

Pentium IV 1.2GHz or better (2.5GHz or more recommended)
512MB RAM minimum (1GB or more recommended)

while a similar devide, M-Audio Fasttrack USB only requires a Pentium II 350 w/ 64MB RAM. Is this because of the software that comes with the Toneport or what?

Certif1ed wrote: Ah - you mentioned Vista.   Despite all the claims, most musician friends of mine have found that Vista suffers more from latency than XP did - due to a design flaw in the new WaveRT subsystem, and the fact that WaveRT doesn't work with external audio devices and falls back to an emulator of the old DirectSound (WDM+ASIO support) subsystem that performs somewhat poorly compared to Windows XP.   On the Sonar forums, people have mentioned disabling multiprocessor support and UPPING the latency to 15ms (apparently this actually works for some people!), because although Sonar supports WaveRT, the drivers typically don't, and when 7ms or lower has been set, all kinds of glitches appear.     Note that increasing the buffer does not necessarily increase the latency in Vista. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms678736.aspx   It's improved in Vista SP1 - but not for USB devices, as you'll also note from the MSDN article that the audio engine calls for an exclusive mode event-driven capture, which only works with PCI.     I'd be happy to be proved wrong, and am interested to see how you get on.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/31/microsoft.technology

Ableton doesn't currently support WaveRT - I use ASIO. The KB37 should arrive soon ... once it's installed I'll install some other software to test it, including Sonar. I'll definitely check out whether WaveRT works.

^ well, I won't go back to XP again ... I guess this simply means that I'll have to live with ~10ms latency for the time being. As long as I can use direct monitoring for recording guitar, it's not that much of a problem anyway ... and keyboards are recorded as midi anyway, and with 10ms latency I can use quantisation to improve the accuracy. Currently I'm just fooling around anyway.

^ I want to decrease latency ... if I increase it everything's fine. I'll try disabling multiprocessor support though. This is usually what you have to do ... make a change and see if there's an improvement, if not then reverse the change and look for something else.

Certif1ed wrote: ^Out of interest, what happens if you disable multiprocessor support (assuming your processor is either hyperthreaded or dual core, in which case the mechanisms to disable "multi" processor are different) and increase the latency?

Since you asked: Yesterday I tried disabling multiprocessor support ... but it had a dramatic impact on overall performance. I used the Ableton Live Suite demo project, which utilizes several software instruments and audio effects ... apparently they're each running in separate threads. It was amazing to see (with multiprocessor support enabled) how small the performance impact really is ... I'm tempted to buy the Gearbox Plug-In and record the guitars dry, so I can tweak all settings (except choice of pickup of course) after the fact.

^ the only problem with the generic ASIO driver is that it only supports inputs 1&2 of the Line6 interface ... in order to use the plugin I would need to use direct monitoring of the processed signal, but route the unprocessed signal to the DAW. Well, *maybe* the latency is low enough that I can use the plug-in for monitoring. Maybe if I use headphones ... after all, 1 meter distance between the ear and the cabinet adds approx. 3ms latency too.

^  what's that ... a 16x12 cabinet?

 Does anyone else have an ACID MUSIC STUDIO by Sony? Maybe i bit off a little more than i can chew but when I bought the thing it was cheap and had a picture of this teen w**ker on the box, playing a Strat, I thought it would be easy to operate but it is not .

weetabix wrote:  Does anyone else have an ACID MUSIC STUDIO by Sony? Maybe i bit off a little more than i can chew but when I bought the thing it was cheap and had a picture of this teen w**ker on the box, playing a Strat, I thought it would be easy to operate but it is not .