I just finished building what should be a pretty powerful PC slave and I'm a bit disappointed that I'm having latency issues making it almost unusable. I took a template that I'd been running on my Mac Pro (1st gen 2.66 with 11GB RAM) and created that same template on my new SLAVE. I loaded up logic and connected to my slave. Everything works but it takes a long time for VE Pro to connect to the slave. It sees all the instances but when I click on connect it is taking a while. Once it does connect, everything is working except there is too much latency. I'm trying to play a staccato part and it just can't keep up. I didn't think I'd have this problem with my new setup. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing some setting somewhere or some optimization for Windows 7. I'm not a windows guy so I did some research and optimized according to a guide I found on Sweetwater's site. I've got nothing else running or even loaded on the machine but VE Pro and AVG virus protection (which isn't set to ever run. I just run it manually). CPU usage on the slave is like 5% and I should have plenty of RAM. Can I do anything to improve the latency? I do have the buffer in Logic set to medium which I believe is required for VE Pro. I'm running at a buffer of 256 in Logic. Things improve if I change the buffer setting in VE Pro down to "none" but I didn't think that'd be necessary. Anyways...I'd appreciate any help on this. I was hoping for a bit more out of this fairly hefty investment in a slave machine.
thanks.
Main DAW
Logic Pro
Mac pro 2.66 11GB Ram
Slave
i7 bloomfield 3.2ghz
24GB ram
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Latency problems with new PC slave
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Hi swpowe,
If you set the buffer in the VE PRO Server Interface to "none", no latency is added to the latency of your soundcard (256 samples in your case), and this only affects live playing. When playing back from your sequencer, the latency is compensated automatically.
How much latency do you actually get? Did you try with different buffer settings in your soundcard? Which soundcard is it?
Best,
Paul
Paul Kopf Head of Product Marketing, Social Media and Support -
I did try a few different buffer settings in Logic. Most were pretty low. I used to work at 512 now I'm needing to hit 128 or 256 to get decent results. I'm using an Apogee Duet as my interface. I haven't adjusted anything on the Slave. Do I need to? I'm using an onboard NIC. Would a separate card do anything?
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Hello swpowe,
I assume that you have a gigabit network, right?
The Apogee Duet is a good soundcard, that should work just fine.
How much latency do you really get?
It´s also important that you are using all the latest VSL software and the latest eLCC on all computers.
If you have been running older versions, please restart your computers after the new installation, just to avoid old processes still running in the background.
Best,
Paul
Paul Kopf Head of Product Marketing, Social Media and Support -
HI Paul, I am using a gigabit network and it is showing gigabit speeds. This is a brand new install (on the PC) and both Mac and PC are using the latest VSL and eLCC versions. I'm not sure how I can really measure the latency. To me, it just feels like more then I thought I'd get. Trying to run a staccato patch at 130bpm is hard because of the delay between keyboard and sound. I'll have to try and take a look at this again tonight to see if anything seems strange. I had thought I'd have better performance offloading to my slave. I'd been running this same template outside of Logic on my mac pro and it seemed to have better performance. That's what I'm comparing to.
