Latency issues with MIDI & ASIO for my drums

[Kaiju]

I currently have a Yamaha DD-65 drum kit I put through a USB>MIDI cable to my PC. I simply run REAPER to record the drum kit using different drum profiles.

The problem I have is with ASIO. I tried to use ASIOforALL, but the latency was worse than that of the driver from my X-Fi audio card. I currently have the ASIO set to 4ms, any less than that (1 or 2ms) and I get problems with the sound crackling and hissing.

I currently have a C2D CPU @ 3GHz, 2GB of RAM running Windows 7.

My question is would another soundcard allow me to play with a better latency?

Are there any other ways to get better latency as i'm annoyed 4ms won't allow me to play faster without falling behind the metronome or track.

One other thing, I want to change my Yamaha DD-65 for a Roland kit, I presume the problem lies with the soundcard, so I will get this latency issue with a new Roland kit too?

 

[NickK]

I have a Roland TD6-KX and I use an m-Audio Firewire Audiophile interface for MIDI i/o via firewire 400 to a macbook pro. I'm also developing a MIDI based application on the mac for realtime playing.

Head over to www.vdrums.com as they have a large number of MIDI drummers (unsurprisingly).

For latency, start with a PCI based MIDI card and a PCI based sound card to minimise the i/o latency as possible. Often the 'professional' cards for musicians are developed with a focus on latency rather then number of features. USB will add latency (especially with your keyboard/mouse/other devices plugged in)
Crackling is often attributed to interrupts and buffer underflows in supplying sound data from system memory to the card itself. So check what else is running on your machine. Raw speed in GHz is only part of the story as any interruption such as memory VM swapping or additional services, attached components all add to what the CPU/windows has todo in that short time period.
Check/minimise the number of devices that share the same IRQ interrupt line as your sound card. This will also cause issues.

Creative drivers suck monkey balls. Which can also add to the interrupt/buffer issues.

 

[Kaiju]

That's a great starting point for me. I joined up to vdrums and will go from there.

Cheers man! - I will probably get a M-Audio Firewire thing too (my mobo supports it) and the TD12KX soon.