Topic: latency spike

Greetings everyone,

I just purchased Pianoteq 6 and it sounds great and works fine ( = no latency) most of the time, but when I'm playing a lot of notes at the same time I sometimes have latency spikes - it is especially noticable on the right hand chords (is it the proper english word?) of the chopin etude 12.

I'm using ASIO4ALL with either the motherboard soundcard or also one in my GPU, with no differences. I tried different buffer sizes (currently 64 samples), different sampling frequencies, enables/disables multicore processing, to no avail. I have a i5-7400 so  I don't think that's the problem (it's never used at 100% anyway).
Any ideas? Could it be my keyboard who is at fault here? I have a Casio privia Px-135

Cheers,
gus

Re: latency spike

I had been having trouble getting low latencies with Pianoteq while avoiding snaps and crackles on my window surface Pro 4, especially when I am running a web browser or some other program in the background. Up until this change that I made listed below, I had been stuck at running at 29 KHz for sampling, and keeping a fairly large buffer, such as 384. Anything below this would cause pauses, pops, and crackles. Even just setting the battery to "high" did not make that much improvement.

I then watched sections of a video on a website called Surface Pro Audio, and made the changes that he suggests:

http://surfaceproaudio.com/surface-pro-...roduction/

This is a fairly long video, but thankfully, it comes with a table of contents. The heart of the matter starts at seven minutes 37 seconds under "tweaking windows". He gives some changes to the power settings, and other changes that are only possible after making a modification in the Windows registry.

After I did what he said, I found a significant improvement. I am now able to run Pianoteq at 48 kHz with a buffer of only 64. Even with the sustain pedal held down, and a five-microphone instrument preset, I rarely push past 40% of the processor as seen on the graph of the performance section of the Pianoteq options. For me, this is fantastic (and I am convinced that it even sounds better and more musical and realistic than what I was getting with the sampling frequency of only 29 kHz – whether it makes any difference to do 44 kHz or 48 kHz is debatable, as CD-quality audio sounds pretty darn good to me, but I was in fact able to push Pianoteq up to 48 kHz without any problems). So far, I have heard no snaps, no pops, and no crackles.

- David

Re: latency spike

Running a web browser in the background and doing audio processing with intention of low latency is never a good thing. You should try disabling the network on Surface if you wanna run Pianoteq without hitches (like completely, disable device in Device Manager).

Last edited by EvilDragon (07-01-2018 09:00)
Hard work and guts!