Sound settings,

[Zephyr]

hey there everyone, I just bought an axiom 61 and it's in the mail, while I wait I decided Id make sure my sound card is all set up, I'm going to be using fl for my mixes so I went into the options there, (screens show a demo version, but I'll buying it soon) I came across some trouble, I've been told many times to use the ASIO drivers, but when I try, I get problems, take a look:

Here's what the default settings were:

Here are my options:

I went to the sb audigy asio option, I got this warning:

If I try to change it like it says I get this warning:

Can anybody help me get this set up? Thanks.

Sorry if the pics are big,

[Nicholestien]

Your asio driver don't support 44100 sample rate.

it said don't change it unless absolutely needed.

change it. because it's absolutely needed.

[Zephyr]

I suppose, where can I update the asio drivers (if that would help) and if changing the sample rate can screw things up, should I change it or would I be better of using a different option altogether? If I must change it what should I change it too?

[Mia]

SB Audigy is weird like that... Use 48,000.

I don't know how much truth there is to the way FL phrases that sample rate warning; Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can say more on this topic, but somehow I doubt it'll cause any real problems.

From what I've read in google results, most people with that soundcard use 48,000 and it works for them.

[dannthr]

Could you try this again with Windows Media Player CLOSED?

[Zephyr]

Closed media player, changed nothing, anyways, I put it to 48000 hz on the sound cards asio drivers and can put it down to 2 ms (lowest setting) without under-runs accumulating VERY slowly (should I put it higher? I get about 1 under run around every 7 minutes, but that was with it just sitting there), What exactly are under-runs and what do they do? Also wat exactly do they do that's bad?

[Mia]

You can set that a bit higher. 2ms is an extremely low latency, so you can afford to have a bit more, basically you want the latency to be as low as possible without getting any underruns. An underrun is where the memory isn't sufficient to keep up with what's going on at a given moment.

Something like 10ms shouldn't be particularly noticeable. Though, if you're working on a big FL project, you may need to set it higher than that, depending on how your comp handles it.

[DDRKirby(ISQ)]

underruns happen a lot more frequently when you have a lot of things going on in a song (makes sense), so just because you can set it at 2 ms while FL is doing nothing absolutely does not mean that you can afford to use the same setting when you're actually having it playback a song.

[Mia]

DDRKirby speaks the truth.

I don't know if you do any midi recording (like with a keyboard) in FL Studio, or sound recording (for example, for vocoding) in FL Studio, but if you do, or intend to do either of those, this may be useful:

When I'm doing or intending to be doing the things I just mentioned, I set my buffer to a low setting. I have a pretty good soundcard and usually when I'm doing these things it's early enough on in the song that I won't get overruns. The reason it's important is because, well, the latency refers to just that, how long, in time, that there is a delay between your pressing of a key, or recording of a sound, and it happening in FL Studio. If you try to record a midi melody with the metronome with your buffer set to 2048, you're gonna have trouble quantizing it.

Now, on the other hand, when I'm NOT doing these things, I set my buffer a bit higher. If I'm mostly just doing things via clicking or step editing, it's the way to go. I don't mind there being a half second delay between me pressing 'play' and the song beginning, if it means not getting glitches in the sound during playback. And that is what will happen if you're getting a lot of overruns.

[Fray]

Miku pretty much said everything I wanted to.

I imagine buffer underruns would show up as clicks, pops, or short silences in your playback. That's more of an annoyance, but a similar thing can happen when you're recording audio (it's more a buffer overrun in that case). You'll get a nasty, permanent glitch in whatever audio tracks you're recording when the overrun happens. And depending on the software, it may just quit recording entirely.

Also, if you're ever going to burn your stuff to a CD, it has to be at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. I'm not sure if FLStudio has a high quality sample rate converter in it -- I think it's got the same "Windowed Sinc" method that Sonar uses. Anyway, make sure that's on if you decide to export to a 44.1k file, otherwise it'll sound nasty.

But yeah, set your latency pretty high (I use like 50ms or more) unless you're recording live MIDI of yourself playing a soft synth, in which case you need to get your CPU usage as low as possible. Not sure if FLStudio has a one button freeze for tracks -- if so, use it! If not you can bounce everything to an audio track before recording to get the CPU time to the minimum.

[DDRKirby(ISQ)]

Fruity does have a "smart disable" feature that auto-disables effects (and in FL7, generators) that aren't currently being used. usually you can enable it on everything, and nothing will be different, except CPU will be spared. be careful about long delays or reverbs and the like though, as it might cut those off prematurely.