Layman with a mission
Layman with a mission
- Subject: Layman with a mission
- From: Dennis Gunn <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 09:43:06 +0900
Hi I am not a developer just a layman with a kind of a mission.
I am a professional musician producer engineer and I have been working with DAWs on the Mac for something like 12 years I guess at this point. I started out in vision and have been using Logic since about '94.
What I have noticed since moving to OSX is how much worse the latency has become I am trying to find out is if there might not be some strategy incorporated into it to better accommodate the more specific needs of DAW users.
I measured the AD DA of my multiface by plugging into input 3 and recording that direct into logic then physically connecting the output of channel three of the RME to the input of channel four of the RME and recording some transients to see how zero that ZLM mixer really was.
I could not believe the result.
The total latency in and out was 62 samples.
I had been told that the fastest convertors around took 50 samples or so one way. But it looks like the multiface convertors do the conversion in 30 samples at very most.
Moving along, the latency I get with the same configuration SW monitoring through logic with logic set to 32 samples is 224.
so: 224 minus 64 (32 each way) for the logic buffers and total 62 for the RME ADDA and mixer leaves 98 samples for, I guess core audio to do it's mediating or whatever it is doing.
I know there is no way that can ever become zero but I can't believe it absolutely has to be as high as it is.
My question is, is there any way that there could be some kind of "professional" mode where in the latency generating parts of whatever part of the Core Audio HAL could be switched off so as to get a shorter time between the I/O and the sequencer? In Windows they actually have that time down to almost nothing.
By way of explanation to non musicians and even to some musicians for whom it is almost unbelievable that that 2 or so ms that 98 samples actually matters:
Since Apple obviously bought Logic and discontinued it on Windows machines hoping that they could create a scenario where the best native sequencer in the world runs exclusively on a Mac, In order to make that strategy work as a sales point to get people to pony up the big bucks for Apple hardware that obviously means they have to make Logic on a G5 quantifiably better than anything running on a Windows machine and better by a significant margin.
The unfortunate reality is that currently Logic 7 is not quantifiably better than Cubase in too many areas at all and at present Cubase appears to be winning on points. Now add to this the fact that on a Windows machine you can reliably do software monitoring in Cubase or Nuendo or for that matter Sonar, Cakewalk and whatever and you simply cannot do it reliably in logic at all because thanks to the latency that CoreAudio adds by the time you have a lot of instruments and processed vocals and or whatever else going on in a mix logic will start sputtering and clicking and popping if you try to use native processing on a live input.
It's a big problem and it is a big problem that you only have on Macs and do not have on Windows so:
A comparison shopper building an nonlinear audio editing system to use in November 2004 says:
Windows + Cubase:
All I need is an IO because I can reliably do all my processing in software and monitor all my inputs with processing in place with an acceptable latency. And the software is by any meaningful measure at the very least as good as any software in the world, and there are a vastly wider variety of plugins available. And to top it off all of there is a Wider variety of hardware from the IO to the CPUs is cheaper than on the Mac side.
Mac + Logic:
I need an IO and maybe a hardware mixer and maybe some hardware compressors and maybe an external speaker simulator because I cannot reliably monitor all of my inputs with processing in place with an acceptable latency. And some people say the software is the best and that nodes will rule the world but others point to several areas where Cubase has more features and there is a much wider variety of plugins that can be run on Cubase and to top it off all of the hardware options you can use with an Apple are severely reduced and some of the best inexpensive options are simply unavailable to Apple users.
So honestly, subtracting Apple partisanship from the picture, which of these options would you choose if you were a new purchaser making that decision today?
Personally I think I would go with the Windows Cubase combination.
Don't get me wrong I think nodes are a fantastic feature and have the potential to make Logic the professional platform of the future, but before nodes can be of any use you still have to do the recording and at that stage the latency problem simply is weighing logic down like a ton of bricks. Also a customer is going to buy the basic system and build from there so buying a node machine will always be something the user does "down the line".
So has/will Apple's strategy of using Logic Pro 7 to win back DAW customers to the Apples platform worked? It sure does not look that way so far to me. At best they have probably stemmed the hemorrhaging of customers but there is still a long way to go before Logic has any kind of edge. (yes the plugins are great but that alone is just not going to be enough, especially if latency issues cause ones like GuitarAmp to be of limited usefulness compared to the competing products on the windows side)
Fixing the Latency in CoreAudio alone will not put Logic/Apple clearly ahead of Cubase+Windows in every way, but it will clearly make it a lot less behind Cubase+Windows since it will resolve all the whole red stuff above, and that is not a small part of the equation for people buying these systems.
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Coreaudio-api mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden
| References: | |
| | >error codes (From: Daniel Todd Currie <email@hidden>) |