AW: Ableton 8 Looping problems

["Rainer Straschill" <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Jeff said: 

>       The actual ASIO block size you can use is dependent on many things:
>       the speed of the CPU, the amount of memory, the applications you
have
>       running at the same time, the firewire chipset (if you use a
firewire
>       audio interface) the graphics card memory, etc.  If the block size
is too
>       small the system won't be able to keep up with requests from the
>       hardware and you will year "clicks".

Let's not forget the audio interface, its interface technology and its
drivers here. The combination can make all the difference here, and it's
also something you can choose rather freely (other than, say, the firewire
chipset of a laptop).

>       If you've got a 5 year old machine with under 1GB of memory and a 
>       lot of software installed then you might have problems getting that
>       without a lot of tuning if you can get it at all.    

The tuning is in fact an important factor here. There's lots of websites
which describe how to tune your OS so it runs best for audio applications.
For my main machine, I actually use two independent OS installations, one
for music and one for all the other stuff.

Another item worth mentioning that hasn't come up is the so-called DPC
latency. This is a property of the computer hardware and lowlevel software
(read: BIOS). Especially for laptops, this value is sometimes over the 
roof,
but can be possibly brought down e.g. by disabling wireless network 
hardware
etc.
Here's a tool to check this: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

        Rainer