I have been having a lot of fun with Megadrum for almost a year now
I started using Megadrum on my old Toshiba laptop (Pentium-M 2.0Ghz 1024Mb ) connected to a Terratec aureon Firewire external sound card and EasyDrummer as softsynth.
A friend, who is a musician (not a drummer) came over a few moths ago and he immediately noticed the delay between the hit on the kit and the sound from the PC
I measured the delay with my scope and it was 25 milliseconds, after tweaking the PC I got it optimized to about 20 Ms and accepted that lower latency was not possible with this computer.
Now I have recently both a faster PC (Pentium E5300 dual core 2,6Ghz 4096Mb) and expected it to be faster.
An other friend came over, he is a drummer, he immediately started whining about the delay
I pulled out my scope again, delay 18Ms, to give you an idea, that’s like hitting your snare drum and the speaker which is producing the sound is placed 6 meters or 18 feet away from you.
Tonight I decided to further analyze the cause of this delay, so I connected my synthesizer thru Midi to my Megadrum,
delay around 10Ms, what Does my hardware synth have 8Ms latency???
To make sure I measured the delay between the piezo and the midi out data.
To my surprise there is a huge variation in latency on the Megadrum midi out port.
The average latency is around 4Ms worst is about 8Ms, latency is measured on the piezo from trigger > 1.0Volt – Midi data last bit send.
Megadrum firmware version is 20090729.
Measurements taken after Megadrum startup with right button pressed.
Below you find the worst scope reading, the picture shows all settings.
I hope there is a way to improve Megadrum performance.
Please advice.
Thanks in advance,
Rob.