Monday 1 February 2010

Building a New PC for Music - Part 7: Music Software

A few days ago I got the notice from DolphinMusic that the items have been shipped. And today they arrived - Great! Finally I will be able to make music again. The MIDI interface M-Audio MidiSport 4x4 Anniversary Edition is recognised by Win7 without problems and without extra installation - it works as a standard MIDI interface. However, M-Audio also offers a driver for Win7/x64 on their website, which I downloaded and installed.
I installed Sonar 8.5, only the first DVD. There are 3 more, but I do not need them right now. This is an "upgrade" version, since I do have SONAR4. However, I was not prompted for any previous version key or anything - maybe this comes when I activate it. SONAR has my details on file; however, I ordered this software not through SONAR.
Finally I install the GPO 4.

The system is now ready!
I load the GPO ARIA player, to play a little around with the Steinway piano. No ASIO driver shows up, because I had not yet installed the ASUS XONAR ESSENCE sound card drivers. For the other on-board soundcard there are the 3 choices MME, DirectSound, and something that I did not yet know: WASAPI. All three of them could only be set to use a buffer of 4096 bytes - and while playing live this caused a significant delay. Quite disappointing.

Starting up Sonar, trying the TruePiano: sounds a bit tinny, no comparison to the rich and full GPO Steinway sound. But at least the latency is low, so I can play live and improvise. But still, a buffer setting too low results in audio cracking.

The overall first impression of this new system is quite disappointing: I thought the performance would be better.

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