I've used the M-Audio 2496 (PCI) as well as RME HDSP. At the moment I'm using the onboard soundcard of the mainboard which is a Realtek ALC889 (8ch with SPDif out).

No problem with either one.

I don't like USB soundcards because latency is quite bad and they have a lot of overhead plus a tendency to drop outs.

I have no experience with firewire cards on Linux but on windows the drivers are not nearly close to the PCI RME drivers. I also have a focusrite “saffire pro” which is a toy compared to the HDSP. The RME drivers are way (!) behind on Linux compared to the Windows drivers. In general it seems like Linux has a better audio system but Windows has better soundcard drivers. So you'll end up with a similar result once everything is optimized. On Linux ALSA drivers don't work for me at all. OSS is my personal choice. ALSA only works with the -nosleep flag on here. And that option is still not as good as OSS for my systems.

So there are many things that add up to span from unusable to absolutely great. Low latency needs a certain combination of the right hardware components. Depending on your mainboard chipset things can change dramatically. I prefere Nvidia and AMD chipsets. And I stay away from VIA (maybe this has changed by now?).

About hyperthreading: yes it can be disabled - and you still get 50% of the CPU. Doesn't help anything. If you use Pd you should go for AMD on Windows and Linux. On Mac you don't have that choice, of course. I'm wondering what the developers would say about that topic?

Ingo

________________________________________

Von: anewkindofblue@gmail.com [mailto:anewkindofblue@gmail.com] Im Auftrag von Pedro Lopes

Gesendet: Sonntag, 6. Juni 2010 19:22

An: Ingo Scherzinger

Betreff: Re: [PD] MIDI In-to-Out Latency

By the way Ingo Scherzinger, probably non-related but what RME do you use in Ubuntu? I need to purchase a soundcard compatible with Linux (since my Motu U.mk3 is a pain...) and looking for ideas...

The ideal card would use USB2.0 and have a minimum of 4 in + 4 out, low latency, ASIO on Windows, and Linux support - the price is the tough part... I really wish that MOTU would consider opening drivers for Linux...bastards.. the card is really good and has internal DSP with great sound results in my consideration.

thanks if you can share some thoughs about your soundcard+linux setup, Pedro On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Pedro Lopes <pedro.lopes@ist.utl.pt> wrote:

Hyperthreading can be disabled - I never tryed it myself - but its in BIOS advanced options for most computers/motherboards I've seen.

Depending on the situation that can be either good of bad, If you only run one intensive cpu program (i.e.: one instance of PD) is good to give a full cpu to it, but if you run for instance Renoise (which for me is cpu intensive) and Pd, disabling hyperthreading will result in even more buffer glitch. I think some game folks used to disable hyperthreading in intel's p4 and get better rates than with it turned on, just to serve as a mere example - but then again Software Engineers would argue that this is just a matter of how threaded the programs are, and how they make good use of that.

Best regards,

Pedro

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Ingo Scherzinger <ingo@miamiwave.com> wrote:

Looks like there are some problems with the soundcard drivers.

I'm running very heavy patches with 3 ms. Both on Windows XP and Ubuntu.

Audio and MIDI.

However, on Windows I am using a RME HDSP card which has very good ASIO drivers. Don't forget to set system options to "background tasks" (very important!).

I also noticed that in general Intel CPUs are pretty bad for Pd since they use hyperthreading which makes Pd see two CPUs and uses only 50% of one core. AMDs are twice as efficient because Pd uses the entire core.

Ingo

> cyrille henry wrote:

> > but since you don't like this, you should : in pd / startup add in

> > "startup flags" :

> > -noaudio -audiobuf 0 -mididev 3

> > than : "save all setting" and it should work for next reboot...

> >

> That's fine but what if you want to trigger sound with the MIDI input?

> I've been trying some settings and find that if I set the delay less

> than 100ms the MIDI delay goes up to about 500ms, if it works at all.

> I usually only use Pd on WinXp to generate background tracks since the

> latency is so awful compared to linux.

> Martin

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Pedro Lopes

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Pedro Lopes

contacto: jazz@radiozero.pt

website: http://web.ist.utl.pt/Pedro.Lopes