PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Dropouts

I haven’t had any dropouts since I changed the settings. This is very good and I now dare to think about recording and get more real tracks, if the system are stable. If not I will try one of your suggested sound interfaces. About sound quality I guess kHz is maybe a guidance. Of the here mentioned RME is 192 kHz, motu, scarlett and Saffire 96. Compared to Roland 44. I guess the multi functionality board with lots of effects and software has a price with compromises here and there.

By the way. Thomann also has Focusrite in a USB version and write for windows 8.

http://www.thomann.de/gb/focusrite_saffire_6_usb.htm

Again, thanks for all the answers. I’ve learned a lot in a short time.


Best regards
Henrik

Paying a higher price doesn't always equate to a better product but many times it does, and in this case, YES, I firmly believe the Focusrite interfaces are worth the cost. The sound interface is the heart of the studio you are building.... don't cut corners in that area. Skimp on speakers, skimp on mics, but get a good interface.

Latency is a delay. It is a delay that is apparent in a recorded multi-track project where you have a number of existing AUDIO tracks that all play together as one. You record a new track using a MIDI synth and as you record all seems to be fine. However, upon playback you notice that the track you just recorded is not in sync, it exhibits a delay. Sometimes, this delay is immediately apparent even during the recording process when you can press the key on the keyboard and the sound is not instantaneous but sounds slightly delayed behind the actual press of the key. The cause is generally because the sound card or interface can not process the midi data quickly and get it back to the speaker in less than 8ms. The sound card, the driver it uses and to some degree the computer all play into this equation but the majority of the cause is the sound interface and it's drivers.



Drop-outs are one thing and latency is another.... they can be related but don't necessarily have to be. Drop outs can often be solved with changing the buffer settings and sometimes the latency settings. It's a good sign that the drop outs were cured with a simple settings change. The test will be to use a synth and see if the latency is gone too.

As far as sound quality.... don't sweat the small stuff.... CD quality is a sampling rate of 44.1khz at 16 bits resolution. Every sound card can do that. Yup, even the factory soundcard in a chip in the cheap lap tops. All of my stuff is recorded at 44.1/24 because the 24 bits of resolution gives me a larger dynamic range and more head room. Sound quality above 44.1kz is not something that the average human ear can hear.... (and that statement might open a huge can of worms).... many folks record above 44.1khz and that's fine. Recording higher than 44.1 simply uses more disk space...and....if you are pressing CD's..... guess what.... it all gets reduced to 44.1/16 anyway and no one's the wiser.

I've been assisting folks with similar issues in the Cakewalk DAW's for many years and sometimes we are able to help them get their existing sound cards to work just fine with some settings changes. If that is the case for you too, you will not need to buy an interface, so use that money for something else as your needs dictate. Some folks back in the day, not wanting to buy a new interface, would have one group of settings for latency and buffers that they used to record, and then on playback and mixing, they would go into the settings and change them for smoother playback.... that seemed to be a lot of work and since I like to record, and then check the results with playback.... that would never work and would be extremely inconvenient for me.... so the Saffire solved that issue.

BTW: Firewire vs USB.... go with USB. USB is a more common port and firewire isn't compatible with every firewire port out there and USB is now just as fast for all practical purposes. I've been fortunate with my firewire Saffire interface. So far, it's been totally compatible with both of my DAW computers but I've heard horror stories from folks who have not been so fortunate.

Keep us posted on the latency issue.

The problem with drop outs came back. A solution was to change setting for sound card. For example select "get setting from sound card", and then I could play back without dropouts for 1 or 2 days.

So I bought the Saffire USB, can now use ASIO and havent had dropouts so far. Instead I get very loud popping noises when I set pc on standby/sleep. Hope it is possible to find a solution for this.