PCI Latency on XP Laptops

Lance Blair · Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008, 17:52 (GMT) Post subject: PCI Latency on XP Laptops

In my constant quest to spruce up my XP laptop rig (it's like a hobby of working on an old sports car at this point) I read a few things about "PCI Latency". With an XP Laptop it's rather difficult to really adjust the BIOS, but with a PCI Latency tool, you can adjust the latency various things which can really improve your audio playback and recording. On my laptop, the graphics/video had a 256 latency setting and everything else was at 64...by tuning the 256 down to 64 and then increasing my firewire to 128, I can now record with five plugins running simulatenously with no dropouts. Before the adjustment I couldn't record with any plugins active. My recordings sound a bit better too.

Here's a link to the free PCI Latency tool I used, there are others out there too.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

Lance -

This looks cool and I will play around with it.

Last week I applied SP1 to my Vista installation and it looks like I'm now getting more latency, not less (Vista has a tremendous amount of latency to begin with compared to XP). I wonder if this tool can wreak any improvement out of Vista, or if it works with Vista at all.

I was looking into Linux as an audio recording platform. What they thought was a real-time kernel turned out to have bugs causing it not to be so real-time. They fixed those bugs, but then I found this fairly recent blog entry describing someone's experience with the FastTrack and Linux (emphasis mine):

Lance Blair · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008, 01:41 (GMT) Post subject:

When I'm wearing my field audio engineer hat, I often have a submix going to a CF Recorder or other Marantz decks (whatever the client throws at me). They're sweet.

When I first started recording vos from my home studio, I often recorded to a Nomad Jukebox MP3 player that would record .wav, and then dump them in to a computer later (or use that as a backup)...sometimes even through the mic in line of the computer if I had to...and it always sounded fine.

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

I have benchmarked three CF recorders thus far and they're quite decent going in throught the line input. I'm going to benchmark the mic inputs as well but must first build a hardware pad to get the signal down to mic level. It seems like everybody's got a recorder now which will do at least 24/48, so I think we've entered a new era in audio recording.