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Thinking of buying a Notebook - how do I get the lowest latency?


Rasmus-DK

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Hey man,

 

I would recommend the Indigo IO.

 

I've owned an XVPocket and a MobilePre USB and neither compare to the performance of the Indigo IO...

 

I have not tried any Firewire interfaces though. There may be some that will offer good performance. Be wary, though, that some Firewire interfaces still require external power and are not bus powered. Also, if your laptop has 4 pin firewire port rather than a 6 pin it will not send bus power and a firewire device connected would require external power.

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the problem of USB-1 is you can't use more than two inputs and outputs, because its transfer rate is about 12 Mbits/sec

therefore it's good only if you record or playback stereo tracks ; firewire or pcmcia are far better

 

the best sound cards for a laptop are the following ones :

RME Hammerfall (cardbus version)

Echo Layla24 (laptop version)

MOTU 828 mkII

M-Audio Firewire 410 (doesn't work on Linux though)

 

Echo Indigo must be good too (but not many inputs/outputs)

The Edirol UA-5 (USB 1) works fine on a laptop (my father uses one)

 

with those cards and with a clean O.S. you should get good latencies, like on a desktop computer

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The Echo Indigo does not work with all laptops - specifically it will overheat and fail if the laptop's CPU is located too close to the PCMCIA slot. That happened to me. But it does seem to work for many laptop owners.

 

OTOH you may not need anything more than a way to get a midi controller hooked up to your laptop. Here is a freeware generic ASIO driver that might allow you to get low latency with your laptop's internal soundcard:

 

http://michael.tippach.bei.t-online.de/asio4all/

 

I use an Edirol PCR-1 USB-powered controller with an audio interface built-in. It works great. :cool:

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Thanks everyone - and (I know - I should have specified that in the first place) I don't many inputs as I mainly just use my keyboard as an input for my VSTi's - I don't record audio...

 

- the ASIO4ALL - wouldn't that be the old ASIO2ks that never went anywhere?

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