I have a problem with my sound card, which is a m-audio firewire audiophile. I can't manage reaching a low latency in pure data : When I use shareware like fruity loops or Live Lite, the shareware automatically detects the buffer size i have specified in the control panel of the sound card and tells me what latency it gets, with a 256k buffer size i have a 5 ms latency (which is good for me).But in pure data, using the M-Audio FW Asio driver, as soon as I try putting a latency less than 60 ms, the test tone becomes very dirty, with a lot of discontinuities. I have tried a lot of combinations with -audiobuf -blocksize... but i simply don't manage to do it. If you have some ideas i would be very glad.
this is a known problem with pure data's portaudio interface. pd is not able to run with low latencies on osx/windoze ... using jack / alsa the situation is better.
the developer branch contains some changes in the scheduler that allows pd to run with low latencies with portaudio. i'd suggest you give this a try ... there are some binaries on sourceforge for windows ... no 0.39 binaries, though ...
cheers ... tim