IMMEDIATE Cues?

[ModeratoMaestoso]

Hi guys,

I've been playing around with the demo of SCS, and have noticed that when an audio cue is triggered, it's not exactly... immediate. I'm on a Core 2 Duo / 2GB laptop, so I don't think it's anything to do with the spec of the machine. What I'm not currently using is the pro sound card I will be. I don't know if it's because of that, but in general, when cues are triggered, I need them to be absolutely on the nail (they are click tracks). Is this possible?

The way I have checked it is to load up a wav file with the click on it as a cue, set it to "preload all", and triggered it. Nothing fancy or complicated.

Cheers,

Martin

[Mike Daniell]

Try disabling the internal mixer. If you're wanting to set up SCS for band backing tracks like the Forever Everly setup then there are a few recommendations to get good syncing between tracks:

• Disable the internal mixer by going to General Options / Permanent Options / Audio Driver and selecting Do NOT use SCS internal mixer.
• On that same tab, set Link Sync Point to 50 milliseconds.
• Make sure all the audio file sub-cues for a cue are the same duration. This is to ensure the audio files can be linked in the audio library. See the Help file for more info (under The Editor / Audio File Cues / Linked Audio Files), and also the forum posting mentioned above.

You will need to close and restart SCS after making the Audio Driver changes listed above.

[Eric Snodgrass]

Martin, in addition to Mike's spot-on suggestions the latency you are experiencing from the "go" trigger to the sound event happening can be due to a few other things as well.
One thing is the latency setting on the onboard sound card you are using on your laptop. I don't know if you can adjust the latency setting lower. If you switch to a better, external sound card then you should experience better performance and be able to adjust the latency.
Another thing could be other programs and processes running in the background in your laptop. These things can hog resources and slow down performance. When experimenting with SCS on your laptop, try disabling Wi-Fi, anti-virus software, and any automatic updating programs or basically any program running in the background. This should clear up more performance issues.

These are only two things to do. There could be more going on, but these two issues are the usual culprits and a good place to start, especially on laptops.

[ModeratoMaestoso]

Thank you very much Mike and Eric! I switched off the internal mixer and adjusted the setting recommeded, and that did the trick. I'm using SCS in a similar way to the Forever Everly setup, but am using it for both SFX and backing track playback.

Eric - thanks for that info. Yeah, my 'production' machines (I will have an SCS machine, a Cakewalk Sonar VSTi host / mixing machine, and a brainspawn forte MIDI routing / VSTi host machine!) use a custom ISO of Windows XP which I use on my DAWs, with almost EVERYTHING switched off - on startup it only uses about 40MB! I just wanted to try it out on my laptop, and with the internal mixer switched off, it's triggering perfectly!

That'll teach me to read the manual!

Thanks,

Martin

[ModeratoMaestoso]

A potential problem has just occured to me - the help states that with internal mixer switched 'off', I can't use ASIO drivers. I have the choice of either a Tascam FW1804 or M-Audio FireWire 1814 on XP Pro SP3. Can I use the 8 ADAT outs with either of these in WDM mode?

Cheers!

Martin

[Mike Daniell]

I don't have any personal experience with either of these devices, but my guess is that the XP drivers will give you full 8-output support. M-Audio seem to have started limiting the WDM capability as from Vista.

If you have either of these devices already then you can test this even with the demo version of SCS. The demo limits you to 2 'devices', which may be 2 stereo pairs if that's what the driver publishes, but even with just 2 devices you can check that SCS can send output to any of the available outputs.