Okay, first of all, to everyone who has professional recording gear: move on to another thread, this is for people who are starting with home recording.
In case you too have tried to record or monitor direct with a soundcard that is unsuited for anything other than playing windows sounds, you may have noticed rediculous latency. We all know that to solve this, we need a proper soundcard with ASIO drivers.
Anyway, I had well over a second of latency on an old pc with an onboard AC97 thingy -calling it a soundcard is definitely giving it too much credit-.
A friend of mine suggested I'd try the ASIO4ALL driver by Micheal Tippach.
http://www.asio4all.com/
It works with every soundcard I think. On my crappy AC97 system, after some minor tweaking with the settings, it brought latency back from something like 1-2 seconds to something very very hard to even notice. I'm guessing it's less than 10 miliseconds. It's totally useable now. Even though my system is still a pile of junk, I think it's quite a drastic improvement. Plus, the little 'control panel' that comes with the driver is hilarious. Click Einstein for advanced settings or click Bush for simple settings
And if an audio device has a problem that is beyond logic, a little 'female' sign is displayed. Big up to mr Tippach, who made his driver shareware and even tells people to donate to charity rather than to him.
Hope this may help some of the broke and new home producers, have fun.
In case you too have tried to record or monitor direct with a soundcard that is unsuited for anything other than playing windows sounds, you may have noticed rediculous latency. We all know that to solve this, we need a proper soundcard with ASIO drivers.
Anyway, I had well over a second of latency on an old pc with an onboard AC97 thingy -calling it a soundcard is definitely giving it too much credit-.
A friend of mine suggested I'd try the ASIO4ALL driver by Micheal Tippach.
http://www.asio4all.com/
It works with every soundcard I think. On my crappy AC97 system, after some minor tweaking with the settings, it brought latency back from something like 1-2 seconds to something very very hard to even notice. I'm guessing it's less than 10 miliseconds. It's totally useable now. Even though my system is still a pile of junk, I think it's quite a drastic improvement. Plus, the little 'control panel' that comes with the driver is hilarious. Click Einstein for advanced settings or click Bush for simple settings

Hope this may help some of the broke and new home producers, have fun.