[PD] windows latency down to 15 milliseconds

[Justin Robert]

I was using my old laptop running xubuntu for a while because the latency
time of running pd on windows. My newer Gateway laptop has poor performance
with the sound card in Linux, so I have to run windows on it. Before, the
lowest I could get it the latency without pops was 60 milliseconds. This was
very frustrating, because allot of what I am doing is real-time guitar
processing and 60 milliseconds is way too slow to use. But I found a way to
get it much much lower. First by using the asio4all driver
http://www.asio4all.com/ with built in sound. This makes a huge difference.
I have tried other asio drivers, but this one performs incredibly with pd. I
cannot say how it will perform on external cards, but on my built in
Sigmatel, it works great. Second, by setting windows xp to run pd at
real-time priority. You do this by right clicking the pd process in windows
taskmaster and setting it to real time. Doing this I can get the latency as
low as I had it on Linux, and possibly lower. I haven't tried lower than 15,
so I'm not sure ;) But I've played for over an hour on windows with no
glitches or pops, well other than the ones I was making on purpose.

Justin Robert
www.justinrobert.com