Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards How to make your keyboard sound like a concert grand.

What size do you set your audio buffer? For what virtual piano besides Pianoteq? It sounds like something isn't set up right for you to have noticeable latency problems.

I have the buffer size increased pretty high so I would not get any sound clipping especially when I jump more than 3 to 4 octaves from one side of the keyboard to another. I notice that's the biggest problem, also with pedaling and repealing. I have polyphony set pretty low as well, I think 128. It seems to me that if the preload buffer setting needs to be high, and the software consumes close to 1 GB of RAM, it would run fine without clipping for fast playing, but there is noticeable latency especially with lots of pedaling. I would increase the pre-load buffer to consume 2 GB of RAM if it helps, but it doesn't seem to. I don't have an SSD drive. I think that would make a big difference. My CPU load is never that high with sampled software. It's higher with Pianoteq but never over 75%. The IO is definitely the bottleneck for sampled software here. The native sound off the Mac is surprisingly good, so I don't see a need for a external interface since I have spare CPU cycles. I suppose if I had a quad core processor may not help, but I have a dual core proc for now.

Like I said, it's playable, and if that's all I've got, I would live with it. Also, when I'm recording, I just know the latency is there and deal with it, but at least no clipping. However, since I switch between digital and acoustic, I do notice the latency on Ivory/TrueKeys. Playability is just not the same as acoustic.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with my setup. These software pianos are very easy to use. They only expose a limited number of parameters to the user interface and don't provide any interface for CLI shell. If you know any conf file tweaks not accessible from GUI that would drastically improve latency I would appreciate it.

If you turn on the native sound on the digital keyboard, you could literally hear a eighth to sixteenth note latency at allegro to presto compared to the native sound. Pianoteq is much less, so acceptable. The native sound has latency compared to a real piano, but it's so slight it is never a problem.

That signals either a fault in your system, your settings, or insufficient computer power.

Hmmmmm,

It looks strange,
On a new mac you should be able to set it to 128 or even 64 samples, without any dropout and with imperceptible latency.

On my 5 years old pc, I am running Pianoteq 5 on a Tango Studio distribution (Linux world) at 64 samples, 48kHz and that gives a total in/out latency of 2,6 msec, without any dropout at 128 polyphony maintained during 1 minute (stress test, pedal down, flat hands on the keys playing anything), and with a cpu charge no more than 60%.

There is maybe something to tweak on your setting

8 octaves appears to be talking about the disc preload buffer rather than the asio buffer....the latter is surely the problem?

I thought Macs had CoreAudio built in and didn't need things like ASIO.

They don't need anything like ASIO or an external soundcard. But it doesn't sound like you know how to set the audio buffer and that is probably your problem. Again, what virtual piano are you using? Look and see what the audio buffer is set to. It shouldn't be more than 128 samples with the poorest designed virtual piano, and can be 64 samples, or 96 samples worst case with others. If you have latency issues with today's state-of-the-art virtual pianos (Ivory II or Vintage D or True Keys) and a recent Mac then you have a setup problem.

Sorry to dig up this old thread, but for closure, I made some system upgrades (Mac OS X upgrade to new version) and now the latency issue is no more. I did not make any hardware upgrades, so it was just installing new OS X. Thanks to everyone that insisted "it's your setup" not software piano compared to Pianoteq. I don't even have an SSD drive.