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The Ultimate Guide to Optimize your Windows PC for the Stage
© 2021 Deskew Technologies, LLC
Optimize your sound card and audio software settings
as Kernel Streaming to operate, FlexASIO uses a different intermediate library called PortAudio
that supports many operating system sound APIs.
If you plan to buy a new audio interface, make sure its manufacturer provides a multi-client audio
driver. Unfortunately, some Windows ASIO drivers still allow only one application to use the audio
interface, and these are known as single-client drivers. Multi-client audio drivers allow you to use
the same audio device with more than one audio application at the same time (two instances of
your audio application counts as two different applications). This is important if you plan to take
advantage of Gig Performer's multi-instance feature and/or if you want to use Gig Performer
together with other audio/MIDI applications.
8.2 Choose your buffer size and sample rate
In this section we will introduce some basic terms such as audio latency, buffer size and sample
rate and suggest recommendations for live use.
Audio latency is simply the amount of time that passes between the sound being generated and
then perceived by your brain. Basically, it is a delay.
For example, if you are 10ft away from the speakers, and since the speed of sound is
approximately 1,000 ft/s in air it means that it takes 10 ft : 1000 ft/s = 0.1 seconds (or 10
milliseconds) for sound to travel from the speakers to your ears. The latency here is about 10 ms.
Buffer size is basically the number of samples that will be collected before your audio plugins get
to process them. Your audio interface is an analog-to-digital as well as digital-to-analog converter.
It takes any audio input, converts that into digital form (numbers) and then on the output side –
converts those numbers back to analog audio.
Sample rate determines how many samples your audio interface will capture every second and
do the above-mentioned conversions. A common sampling frequency for live use is 44.1 KHz.
For example, if your buffer size is 256 and your sampling rate is 44.1 KHz (44,100 times per second,
as Hz means cycles per second) then your latency will be 256/44,100 seconds which is 0.0058
seconds or 5.8 ms.
If your buffer size is 256 and the sample rate is 96 KHz you will get 256/96,000 = 2.7 ms latency.
You can experiment with this: If you change the buffer size to 128 and leave the sampling
frequency at 44.1 KHz – your latency will be 2.9 ms and so on.
These values directly affect the performance of your PC, as smaller latency values require your
computer to respond more quickly to process all those samples in time without producing any
glitches.
It has been shown that people can perceive differences between 3 ms – 10 ms, and that our brain
cannot distinguish anything below 3 ms.