Ren pads now acting "drunk"

This is getting real disappointing real fast. I have 20 more days to evaluate the Ren.

Noticed a few legacy file issues, but that's not my new problem....

I tap on the pads and there's a huge delay between my tap and when the actual sound is heard and recorded. Beats now come across off time and retarded.

This problem did not exist when I first set up the device, everything was fine. I reinstalled the software, drivers and the new update and said problem still exist.

What is going on? What happened? Maybe it's the new firmware update?

I called akai and we adjusted some setting which made it worse....

I'm really thinking of getting another 5000, for my workflow has been non existent

Maybe the buffer setting for the latency got reset and are on like 1024 or something where you pad input is going to mad delayed on audio output. That's what it sounds like.

Try and see if you can go down to a 128 buffer in the latency settings and if it's Windows go in Device manager and disable any motherboard sound drivers or other ASIO drivers, might help.

If it's not something basic like that, then maybe the Ren owners here can help you further.

Thanks for the reply, I had 3 audio device types in my preference setting. They were windows audio, Directsound and Asio, I chose "Asio " and it seems to be back to normal

I also disabled the standard windows audio driver, don't know if this made a difference

Hopefully all is well now, just need to figure a few more tweaks

Yeah that's exactly the typical proscribed set up on a Windows DAW computer. Disable any WDM/Direct X drivers and the Windows sound is usually the WDM, Direct X used in you media players and video games.

For the most part you can use an ASIO interface for everything, But if it's not multi client ASIO you might only be able to output audio from one thing at a time. Although most let you run at least two streams, like web audio while your Host and/or Ren are running. I don't have one so not sure on the limits or lack thereof on that particular driver.

If I see a question in the Ren forums that seems more OS based I post just in case I can save a guy waiting for replies and suggest something to get started.

This tweak walk through here is widely used by everybody from Cisco CCNA Net Engineers to audio/video types. Really solid and well explained. It makes it easy to determine if your personal daily usages are going to allow you to disable certain processes and services while still being stable OS wise and secure web wise.

For example you might turn of remote desktop because you never log on your desktop from a remote location, or you know you will never need say the guy at Dell to take over desktop and help, as its more common to just go to forums and see what help you find.

http://www.blackviper.com/2009/10/01/bl ... er-tweaks/

Windows 7 doesn't really need any tweaking, although a few wifi drivers sometimes do still cause issues like in the XP days. But every bit of RAM and getting clock cycles back can't hurt. But the gains aren't as drastic as stripping down XP used to be. Both Windows and OS X run basically the same type of background services with about equally CPU/RAM usages.

When you get further down the page there's a hotlink for the chart that clearly show just how much you might want to disable.

http://www.blackviper.com/service-confi ... gurations/

Glad the Device Manager stuff got the ball rolling.

I hope you got the mpc 5000 projects working? See my tips in the other thread (they helped with 2000 XL and 2500).

sell it and get a guitar, it has no latency


[edit]
just fun

Actually an electric guitar the further you move away from the amp does have some latency, but just like 5ms deviations that we work with fine with on our in the box stuff at 128 buffers.

think you got guitar problems

Better Mouse Trap wrote:Thanks for the reply, I had 3 audio device types in my preference setting. They were windows audio, Directsound and Asio, I chose "Asio " and it seems to be back to normal

I also disabled the standard windows audio driver, don't know if this made a difference

Hopefully all is well now, just need to figure a few more tweaks

Stick with the MPC Ren driver. Set your buffer anywhere between 64-512 samples. If you use minimal effects, you can use lower buffer settings. You may need to increase the buffer if you are using many effects.

Keep in mind that if you use a lot of effects and forced to increase the buffer to prevent pops and clicks....then you may experience latency when striking the Ren's pads.

Welcome to the world of computers

I've been writing music with computers since 1997, talk about latency back then wow! Plus I was a kid with no money and a crappy computer

But you do what you gotta do.

Built in standard Windows drivers have horrible latency. Which is why there is ASIO (thanks Steinberg). OSX is built with a good low latency system called Core Audio which everything runs on. In this case (not to say PC or Mac is better) a Mac "just works" as some say.

If you don't want to deal with a lot of configuring and setting up of a computer you may want to think about getting a Mac some day. PC's and Macs are both great but it might keep it simple for you in case you get things mixed up again in the future.

Then again you've already learned a valuable lesson about audio and computers.