Optimising your PC for audio on Windows 7 - Focusrite Advice

I contacted Focusrite the other day and they sent some good tips to help optimising a PC system for low latency when using an external interface such as one of theirs. I'd say these tips are transferable to all Windows audio systems.

I thought I'd share the links as some of the tips I didn't think of doing myself. It hasn't acutally made a difference to my Ableton latency figures but it might for you!

http://uk.focusrite.com/answerbase/optimising-your-pc-for-audio-on-windows-7

I particularly enjoyed the below link as it gave specific tips for disabling windows services which can give your PC a boost. It's not going to make a major difference, depending on how far you are prepared to tweak, but it's nice to know someone has tested all this and I completed the 'safe' configuration which disabled something like 10 services on my system...and all is fine.

http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1-service-configurations/

For what ever reason the bloke who runs the site above thinks he's from Men In Black or something. Made me chuckle.

Hope this can help you in some way.

audio is funny.

DAWs most of the time will dynamically control the latency of your shit.

I didn't realize that for forever, and never understood why my shit got all laggy.

I didn't know that when I add 15 convolution reverbs to my project that it would fuck my shit up.

Now I don't use as much convolution shit and super high latency shit when I'm fuckin around on my DAW.

i've tried a million USB interfaces and all of them have this weird intermittent problem where i have to power cycle them to get the sound to come back. out of nowhere i'll hear a crackle and then nothing until i power cycle. its probably windows because i've tried like 3 different brands of interfaces. anyway maybe doing some of this will help, i'll try when i get home. thanks d00d!

No worries.

Any chance did you ask them why my audio cuts out randomly and I have to unplug and plug in my A/I again? Been having this issue for a while, and it disappears for long periods of time and then shows up again. It's perplexing.

''We do have a new driver on the way soon which may give you some improved performance, but this is not guaranteed. If you subscribe to our beta site, http://beta.focusrite.com, you will get an notification when this driver is available.

You will also find that the higher the sample rate that you run at, the lower the latency that you get will be. So the highest latency will be at 44.1kHz and the shortest at 96kHz.

As Dan said, the latency stated in daw software can often be inaccurate. You would need to physically measure an impulse from the output of the interface back to an input to get a more accurate figure.''

That's the last message I got. If you go to that link, you might be able to get a different driver to remove the issue.

  On 6/4/2015 at 3:14 PM, skibby said:

audio is funny.

 

DAWs most of the time will dynamically control the latency of your shit.

I didn't realize that for forever, and never understood why my shit got all laggy.

I didn't know that when I add 15 convolution reverbs to my project that it would fuck my shit up.

Now I don't use as much convolution shit and super high latency shit when I'm fuckin around on my DAW.

Fucking thank you!!

I have been wondering where I've been getting so much latency from and it's all the instances of convolution I've got going on. Doh!

  On 6/4/2015 at 3:21 PM, andihow said:

i've tried a million USB interfaces and all of them have this weird intermittent problem where i have to power cycle them to get the sound to come back. out of nowhere i'll hear a crackle and then nothing until i power cycle. its probably windows because i've tried like 3 different brands of interfaces. anyway maybe doing some of this will help, i'll try when i get home. thanks d00d!

Don't plug it into USB 3.0? I was having this issue. It was because the saffire 2i4 doesn't like being plugged into USB 3.0.