Track Preview - Solitary Man

Sea of Tranquility by joelsuttonmusic

Track 1 from my unreleased "Passing Days" Ambient/New Age demo tape. I'm thinking about re-working this album (in the long term) for a more serious release. Would love to hear your opinion.

ASIO4ALL 2.9 has just been released

Yes it's another official release of ASIO4ALL by Michael Tippach and it's working better than ever on Windows Vista! As I mentioned in a previous blog I use this with Ableton Live when on the move. Works really well. Perhaps not quite the same sound quality as my Lexicon Alpha but that's not ASIO4ALL's fault. That's the limitations of my built in sound interface in my laptop.

To give you a bit more of an idea of what ASIO4ALL does (or indeed any ASIO driver) it's all to do with latency. That is, the time it takes for the computer to a) work out that you've pressed a key on your MIDI keyboard, b) work out what sort of sound to send to the speakers, and c) actually get the sound to the speakers. Because computers are general purpose devices it can take a while for all this to happen. When I say a while I'm talking about milliseconds and although that sounds small it is quite noticeable when you're actually playing a virtual instrument. So what we need to do is to get that delay time to be as small as possible without overloading the computer. That's what ASIO drivers a for... they're specially optimised bits of software that keep those computer audio latencies as "under control" as possible. Until ASIO4ALL came along one would have to buy special audio hardware to get the low latencies.

Traditional MIDI keyboards/synths have latencies that are so small that we can't notice them. So if you're not using audio (including the metronome) in your sequencing software (only MIDI messages to your keyboard) then you generally don't need to worry about all this latency stuff. All the sound will be coming from your keyboard.

So that's a little bit about latencies to celebrate ASIO4ALL's new release. You can download it from the ASIO4ALL web site.

Beta Testing Ableton Live and ASIO4ALL

Yes... I am still here :D I've been very busy with a recent trip to Melbourne and lots of work happening in my day job. Over the last few days I've been devoting most of my music time to testing the new Beta versions of Ableton Live and ASIO4ALL.

Live is, of course, my primary work horse for music and ASIO4ALL is an excellent addition to my set up. What it does is allow me to use my laptop sound card as a low latency audio device. This is particularly handy when I'm making music on the move because it means that I don't have to lug around my full USB audio interface. Space in my laptop bag is only part of the problem... my Lexicon Alpha is USB powered and it's an unwanted drain on the battery when I'm out and about.

The updated version of Live is also looking pretty good in my humble opinion. It's mainly bug fixes and I'm very happy that they've been able to fix one of my two main issues (at the moment). The resolved issue is the moving of clips in between tracks which contain the new External Instrument plug-in. When this is wired to a multi-timbral VST plug-in it crashes the non-beta version of Live every time. So I'm very excited about this fix making its way into the stable version because I'd like to make use of this feature more in the future.

Anyways, back to it. Lots to do today :)