Laptops and Latency...

[Steve Lawson <steve@steve-lawson.co.uk>]

The lovely Jeff said about working with MAX/MSP on a laptop -
 >>still loving it, and latency not bothering me at all. Particularly  
since leaving the m-audio interface behind.....<<

one of the major differences between your music and mine is that your  
sound source is acoustic - so your relationship with latency is going  
to be very different in that you're already dealing with two separate  
sounds - the acoustic one and the processed one. A 7-10 millisecond  
latency on that is going to be pretty hard to pick up, I'd have  
thought...

For me as a bassist, especially when playing percussively, I find the  
disconnect that I feel when presented with that kind of latency is  
just nasty. I could deal with it if I was using the direct monitoring  
thing through the soundcard, but that would then mean that I'd need  
an external processor as well, and would defeat the point of using a  
laptop. :o)

We're talking about tiny tiny latency margins here, and loads of  
people are going to find that they don't notice them at all. For  
those peoples, a laptop is a cool way to go, if they don't mind  
having a laptop on stage etc.

Gimme hardware any day of the week. Now if there was a hardware box  
that'd run Max/MSP with the kind of undetectable latency that the  
Looperlative is running (I think Bob said something silly like 0.3 of  
a millisecond - and someone else said it was less than the time it  
takes for an acoustic guitar signal to reach the ear of the player...  
Don't quote me on that though... ;o)

cheers!

Steve
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