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Old 12-31-2014, 01:56 PM
dj dj is offline
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Join Date: Jan 1970
Location: Balderson, Ontario, Canada, 100 kms (60 miles) from Ottawa
Posts: 799
Default Re: Using ASIO4ALL to bring down latency

Hi, Sherry, Arslan1:

If I can jump in and sound pedantic for a while:

It's important to recognize the difference between MIDI data and audio data.

Notation Software products deal strictly with MIDI data, which is simply a stream of information that says, at its simplest, "Turn on a note; turn off a note" and a few other things. Composer has no built-in audio devices.

As Sherry's post outlines, you have to direct your MIDI stream from Composer to an audio device of some kind, either external (hardware) or internal (software). In your case, the Aria player is an internal piece of software, so you must use a software MIDI port (Sherry's suggestion is LoopBe; there are others) to re-direct the data stream to it.

Audio devices are where the sound is made and a driver like ASIO4All deals strictly with taking audio data from your audio device and sending it to the computer's speakers. When an audio device receives a MIDI message, it then responds (assuming all channels and voices are set properly) by sending data out through its driver (in this case, ASIO4All) to the speakers where it, finally, becomes sound and, hopefully, music.

Think of Composer as a tiny little conductor in your computer, waving their arms, saying "Play this note now" and of the Aria software as a tiny little musician playing the note. ASIO4All is the microphone they are playing into that lets us outside of the computer hear the music.

And, yes, they wear tiny little tail-coats and black bow ties.

Good luck.

David
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