Low latency in Pd achieved in Windows !

This is great news for me, although some may have been aware of this for a long time (and although I mainly use Pd in Linux), but I decided to give Asio4All another chance tonight, and guess what : it works !

I tried it with Pd-extended 0.42.5, and I managed to get a latency of 8 ms on a machine running Win XP with an Intel dual-core at 1,66 GHz.

I just installed the latest stable version of Asio4All, and chose “ASIO (via portaudio) in the Media menu. I then modified the Audio settings by choosing the right interface for audio I/O (it should be something like “ASIO ” followed by the name of your audio interface, so mine shows up as “ASIO E-MU 0404 | USB”). And it tweaked the latency value until I found on that was low enough with no clicks or other audio distortion.

A few problems still:

• I can’t see the Asio4All icon in the tray, and i can’t access the control panel from Pd either, so I can’t fine tune Asio4All to reduce latency even more.
• The result is quite strange depending on the latency value chosen in Pd (I can get some noise even with very high values, like 50).
• I tried to check the “use callbacks” option in the audio settings, and it seems to allow for even lower latency. Unfortunately this is not stable at all, and the audio goes down after a few seconds and my interface disapears from the audio settings.

Apparently newer versions of Pd work better, so i’ll give Pd 0.43 a shot when I have time.

To be continued…