WDM Latency issue Win7

damionleetaylor wrote on 12/8/2012, 9:34 AM

HI,

When recording vocals (anything) via WDM (multi-channel) i get a recording latency. Using WinXP i did not get this issue. Since upgrading to Win7 i have only been able to use ASIO selection for in sync recordings but monitoring with this selection isnt my ideal. Right now WDM selection makes my recordings out of sync as it records slightly late. I did use Sam Pro 11.5 and thought maybe it was a compatability issue but i have since upgraded to MusicStudio 13 and still have the problem. I used WDM in the past as it would record spot on and monitoring sound was not coloured or delayed. I have set up ASIO as tight as i can get it to record etc but i still prefer WDM.

I have : HP Dual Xeon 5.6Ghz Desktop PC 8GB Windows 7 x64 (plus all updates)

Creative Soundblaster X-FI extrememusic (latest drivers)

As i've said WDM worked flawlessly on my old PC with WinXP but not on my new PC with Win7. Its not a major downer as i can use asio but i prefererred WDM. If any expertise can shed light on whats wrong this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Damion.

Comments

hueseph wrote on 12/10/2012, 1:41 AM

ASIO is the better option anyway. It is the defacto standard with any other DAW in Windows. Your sound card is not exactly equipped to do the job anyway. A proper audio interface with decent ASIO drivers will make a world of difference. There's a plethora of affordable interfaces out there.

I'm not a fan of Creative cards nor the EMU cards that they promote as "professional" hardware. There's a reason why they've all but disappeared from the the prosumer DAW market. Soundbashers are great for gaming and watching movies but not so good for audio production. It's not just my opinion. There are plenty of Pros that feel the same way.

At any rate, try ASIO4all and see if you can use a setting of 128 samples or less. This should give you a latency of less than 15ms. You shouldn't notice it at all. If it still bothers you, there's always direct monitoring......unless of course you are only recording virtual instruments, in which case you will have to live with some very minor latency.

damionleetaylor wrote on 12/15/2012, 3:52 AM

ASIO is the better option anyway. It is the defacto standard with any other DAW in Windows. Your sound card is not exactly equipped to do the job anyway. A proper audio interface with decent ASIO drivers will make a world of difference. There's a plethora of affordable interfaces out there.

I'm not a fan of Creative cards nor the EMU cards that they promote as "professional" hardware. There's a reason why they've all but disappeared from the the prosumer DAW market. Soundbashers are great for gaming and watching movies but not so good for audio production. It's not just my opinion. There are plenty of Pros that feel the same way.

At any rate, try ASIO4all and see if you can use a setting of 128 samples or less. This should give you a latency of less than 15ms. You shouldn't notice it at all. If it still bothers you, there's always direct monitoring......unless of course you are only recording virtual instruments, in which case you will have to live with some very minor latency.

Update

My creative card never let me down in the past & WDM gave me zero recording latency on XP desktop, i do have a pretty decent rackmount M-Audio fast track ultra for my mobile recording rig and will be setting that up soon on a decent laptop with Win7 & SMS2013 (I'm sure i will be on here again with questions !

So, i reformatted the drive back to XP from Win7 on the desktop pc and guess what....Zero latency in WDM !

I could have coped with ASIO but even at 128 samples it was still choppy on Win7 when given any kind of load which is strange i have plenty of processing power, increasing buffers only made it worse i tried everything and nothing is as good as WDM for laying vocals. Obviously i got to use asio for VST etc. So i find its not software related or hardware related i figure its OS related and features for DAW related user actions (i.e mixer etc) on Win7 are just NOT as good as XP.

Thanks for your input hueseph,

Damion Lee Taylor