Topic by ankipruthi

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Topic: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

Hi everyone,

I have been struggling to get round trip latency lower than 20ms in pianoteq.
My configuration is Ryzen 7 3700X, Behringer UMC204HD, Windows 10 22H2.
This is after optimizing the following things after going through lots of previous posts on latency:

All unnecessary background processes were turned off. This includes adobe, asus, indexing service. There's no antivirus slowing things down. Processor usage has been around 0.5% or less at idle.
Processor minimum and maximum power state is set to 100. Its on high performance power plan.
Temperature throttling is off, and temps are well below 50 degrees.
All optimizations according to fl studio's low latency guide were applied.

Below are the frequencies and buffer sizes.
These are average values out of a number of values i took. All samples were within about 2ms more or less.

Balanced power plan -
Windows direct audio low latency - 50 ms (as expected)
Behringer ASIO -  48 khz 64 samples - 20 ms

power saving off, max performance plan, -
48 Khz, 64 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz 32 samples - 20 ms
96 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms

Test methodology -
I used an external recorder, in my case, phone, to record the audio, independent of the computer and noted down the time between the click sound of mouse or key sound of keyboard, and the point at which waveform of the note starts to form. I did this in a fairly quiet setting to eliminate any background noise affecting the results.

I've added a screenshot and one of the many recordings in this folder.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/...sp=sharing

I also used RTL Utility by oblique audio to measure the rtl of the audio interface. This was done by taking output cable and connecting it to input jack and sending a click signal. That turned out to be 5.8-6ms for 48 Khz 64 samples.
Latencymon utility does not detect any interrupts that could cause latency to increase.

Now my question is, what could be causing this extra 14ms. I just cannot figure out. Is it pianoteq itself needing this long to compute? Could there be something wrong with drivers? Perhaps it says ASIO but pianoteq isn't still using ASIO? Is there a delay added between keypress and hammer strike somewhere in pianoteq which could be adding this? May be something somewhere in windows is still configured wrong?

I also tried the same with ableton live and its latency hovers at 25ms or higher. Even though it reports input+output latency to be around 6ms. But this could simply be the time ableton needs to read a sample off disk and do a bunch of computations on it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Last edited by ankipruthi (02-02-2023 17:58)

Reply by Antonio M

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

I don't understand this part:

ankipruthi wrote:

power saving off, max performance plan, -
48 Khz, 64 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz 32 samples - 20 ms
96 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms

is it really supposed to be 20 ms all of them?

Could it be the delay on the microphones setting?
(I didn't fully understand all details on your question...)

BTW my 8.0.5 on Linux now has internal sampling up to 384000 with 512
32 bits depth
sample = 1.3ms
with 5 active output channels and 5 mics
(this is on my desktop, the PTQ computer looks normal - I still dream of making the desktop silent so I can use it for Pianoteq...)

Reply by ankipruthi

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

Antonio M wrote:

I don't understand this part:

ankipruthi wrote:

power saving off, max performance plan, -
48 Khz, 64 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms
192 Khz 32 samples - 20 ms
96 Khz, 128 samples - 20 ms

is it really supposed to be 20 ms all of them?

Could it be the delay on the microphones setting?
(I didn't fully understand all details on your question...)

BTW my 8.0.5 on Linux now has internal sampling up to 384000 with 512
32 bits depth
sample = 1.3ms
with 5 active output channels and 5 mics
(this is on my desktop, the PTQ computer looks normal - I still dream of making the desktop silent so I can use it for Pianoteq...)

Thank you for replying, yes what i observed was indeed 20ms latency on all of them. Which I know makes no sense. 192 Khz @128 samples atleast should have much lower latency. Or 48 Khz 32 samples for that matter should halve it. But it doesn't. Nothing changes.
For mic, delay compensation is switched on and delay is set to 0 on them. But I will try setting output to stereo or mono and test this again. Edit: I just did. Turned off mics and used stereo output instead. The result is the same. Latency does not go below 20ms. I am beginning to wonder if its windows at fault here or audio interface drivers.

Last edited by ankipruthi (02-02-2023 11:03)

Reply by miiindbullets

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

This is weird. Have you tried the ASIO4All drivers, by chance?

YouTube

miiindbullets's Website

Reply by ankipruthi

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

Yes, I had tried asio4all a while ago. But then switched to native ASIO. Turns out it was somehow a part of the problem. Uninstalling asio4all helped with another 4ms and now latency is down to ~16ms. I guess that and the native drivers were conflicting somehow even when asio4all was not in use.

After spending a day of uninstalling and reinstalling all sorts of audio, gpu, mouse rgb drivers, trying to narrow down the problem, I think i will have to just make do with 16ms latency until i get the chance to do a bios update and clean OS reinstall. Hopefully that will fix it.

Reply by ankipruthi

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

Found the next culprit. GPU/Windows GUI/GPU drivers? One of these.

Either way, if i minimize the application, be it ableton and some other vst or pianoteq, I now get approx. 10ms latency. This is more than usable. Feels much much better. Though it would still be good to know how to actually fix this without having to minimize the windows and play. If an app is visible and is drawing something on the screen (virtual keyboard for eg. or just sound meters and active sample in ableton), latency drops again, back to 16ms.

Doing a clean install of gpu drivers did not help, so I guess this is what I will figure out later if there's a permanent fix and post here.

Reply by marcos daniel

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

Enter to the UMC control panel, then under buffer settings uncheck and check the safe mode. It is weird but for some reason the last Behringer driver gives some latency.

Last edited by marcos daniel (03-02-2023 03:55)

Reply by ankipruthi

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Re: Yet another latency thread (Solved! almost)

marcos daniel wrote:

Enter to the UMC control panel, then under buffer settings uncheck and check the safe mode. It is weird but for some reason the last Behringer driver gives some latency.

I tried it and it didn't really change anything for me. Latency remained at around 10-12ms regardless.
I also googled and found that recent nvidia cards and drivers have been inducing higher latencies and audio dropouts. So, I am a bit more sure now that's the issue. And i'll just have to live with it since I need the nvidia GPU and drivers for work.