Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tackling latency and setting up audio on the Surface Pro”.
Right, let’s have a look at the whole audio engine situation. Now I always always always recommend using an external USB audio interface when making music with the surface. However, I’ve come to understand that many many people out there just want to use it as a. I just want to use a headphone output and they want to mix and make music without having to fuss around with external peripherals. That’S all fine, but there are reasons why I recommend the USB audio interface.
It just makes life simpler, well and also more complicated, cuz. You’Ve got to carry an extra piece of gear with you, but the main reasons. Let me try and big up the idea of an audio interface. The reasons why you want an audio interface, a USB you’ll, do in the face ah physicality to start with you’ve got proper connections. You can put up a microphone in here. You can phantom power it. You can plug a guitar in here headphones. You got individual controls over gain or over monitoring over headphone volume, control and output volume control.
It’S a comprehensive solution, even in a little box like this, it’s gon na give you the ability to make high-quality recordings to plug everything in, and it’s gon na work. Very. Very well with Cubase or your selected door, the onboard sound, not so much I mean.
Obviously you can’t plug anything into it. It has a microphone built-in, but there’s no line in there’s no way to get sound into Cubase. Unless you mean, if you’re, using purely MIDI and virtual instruments, well then, yes, you do have an output through the headphone socket here on the side or through the on-board speakers, if you’re really going a bit low fie. But all these things are possible and I just wanted to show you how you set up both of these within Cubase to make them work the best for you. You will find the audio settings under studio, studio, setup and then VST audio system at the bottom.
There. I’Ve currently got the fast track duo SEO driver loaded now azio ASIO, it’s very very important. It stands for audio system in out and it’s steinberg’s own driver protocol to allow low latency audio. What’S low latency audio, oh well, I’m going to demonstrate that in a second, but essentially it’s a delay between between hitting the key and hearing a sound that is latency.
That is the time it takes for the pros in your system to go. Oh, it keeps me impressed. Oh I’m, going to generate some audio. Oh my gosh.
Stick it on to the output that is latency and that can be playable more or less real-time, or it can be unplayable and far too long to enable you to make any music and what’s important for me in a system like this and trying to make music Is that we have very low latency while not being a drag on the processor and an audio interface, a USB audio interface with a decent, a co-driver is going to do that. The onboard sound, not quite so much but we’ll come to that in a second. So, with the fast track duo selected, I’ve got good sound coming out here, high-quality to my speakers on proper jack cables. All that sort of business and the latency is very good.
I can play this in real time with no bother excellent. Now, if I switch to the onboard sound there’ll be a little bit of a difference, nothing is now coming out of here. You can hear it crackle. Now. What you hopefully can see and hear is there’s a delay between striking the key and hearing a sound. It’S not a massive delay, but it’s makes it really unplayable, as if I’m playing a piano, that’s down the other end of the hall.
That’S because the input output latency of using the onboard sound the standard windows drivers is about 20 milliseconds. 20. Milliseconds is too long. What you always aiming for is under 10 milliseconds.
For me, 10 milliseconds starts to feel like a real time. That’S what this is giving us. However, the standard windows drivers are going to give us 20 milliseconds now believe me, that’s far better than they ever used to used to be standard, 500 milliseconds adds in half a second that used to be the standard latency the standard buffer size they the space of Memory in which windows would give the CPU in order to process audio in order to maintain a stable stream of audio, it would give it half a second to play with that’s why whenever you pressed play media player, it would always take half a second for the Actual playback to begin these days, it’s much much better, but it’s still nowhere near real-time in terms of music software.
Now, that’s not a problem if you’re just mixing, if you’re just playing stuff back and editing, it is a problem if you’re trying to play something or if you’re, trying to monitor through effects through software, so you’re plugging your guitar in and you’re trying to to listen To that as you play and as you record, but of course there’s no input to the surface without an external audio interface, so that’s perhaps not an issue, but I’m just making a point. So can we do something about this? Well, luckily, we can there’s a third PI application called add 0 for all, and that’s essentially like a wrapper for the Windows driver and fools windows and Cubase into believing it’s a proper Ezio audio interface. The result of that is that it allows it to run at lower latency and so gives us a workable solution.
Let’S have a look at that, so we go to my list here again and select this time as the o for all now. This has dropped the latency down to under 10 milliseconds. Just like this, and now it’s suddenly playable, it’s suddenly become playable. So this he’s now a low enough latency to use the onboard sound the headphone output properly without any bother without any lag without any drag, and it can actually probably go a little bit keener than that. I push it a little bit now. Let me bring up the controls for a Z overall, it’s under this little green button here. So the first thing you need to do is hit the spanner and that will bring up the Advanced Settings and then you’ll see these two outputs, they’re real Tech’s. Second, output and the real tech, regular output, the regular one refers to speakers. The second one refers to the headphone output under both of those. What you want set is that first output, the 44 point 1 to 48 kilohertz output. That is the one you want activated, not the other one, not the 8 to 192 kilohertz, that’s really for sort of blu-ray and DVD Blake playback. It’S not got anything to do with making music.
So you need that first, one selected. So, just to recap that then, with a 0 for all, you download it from a zero for all comlink again in the description download it install it. It will find your audio drivers, you load it up in Cubase, so that the control panel appears you go to advanced. You set it to that. First, output, the 44 point: 1 to 48 kilohertz output: that’s the one you want to set it to on both the second output and the first audio output driver, yeah and you’re.
Getting all of that great now. The other slight issue is: how do you swap between headphones and speakers? So you know you’re on the bus and you’re doing all your music on your surface pro and your mate goes oh well, I can either listen and the rest of the bus goes yeah. We can all join in riah.
Just stick it on speakers. You unplug that nothing happens m. Yes. What you need to do is go into connections here and under there you can set the output to the other two outputs here. It’S not automatic because they are separate driver, so unplug inner headphones doesn’t automatically kick four speakers into being. It does in Windows, because that’s designed to do that within your audio software, you have to specify your outputs if you’re, using an audio interface like this, it has a headphone socket on it. So that’s always present.
You’Ve always got a line out, put two speakers and a headphone socket. That’S one of the reasons why it’s so much better. However, if you just swap those around, then it should, with a bit of luck, come out of your speakers lovely and to go back to my headphones now go over here and there’s my audio connections, just plugging my headphones back in yeah just a minute just a Minute there you go easy-easy in it.
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