Help!!!For the love of God!!!!Latency???????

[Cid]

Okay...here's the thing....I canned my old Tascam 424 casette multi-track and was ready to jump into the world of digital (I know,I know..better late than never). I have an imac dv special edition(ooh!), with 400mhz, 128megs. I was eyeing up the new Tascam US-224. I could sequence, and record audio on my mac....great!!!...I was all set to order , when this salesman told me that latency would be a big problem, that USB was never meant for audio, let alone multi-tracking..."latency? I asked....um...what?...he said that I would experience a delay in my tracks, about a couple of seconds...so when i was playing a chord I would hear it a few seconds later...scuse me???....but how uninspiring is that????...this can't be, can it?...I mean how is a person supposed to record heartfelt, inspiring tracks?...anyway he said that the midiman Quattro was a little better, but I still would have to put up with latency...anyway, could someone help me out?...give me some info about this...thanks in adavance....
Chris
cid@nbnet.nb.ca

[pooprobot]

Does your iMac have firewire? If so, then I would purchase a firewire audio interface instead of USB. If not, then you have no choice but to use USB since I know for sure that there are no PCI expansion slots in your iMac. USB was never intended to handle that much data

[DAS]

On some equipment there are some methods for monitoring in a "live mode" or "tracking mode" where you maybe don't have all the functionality of your DAW software in terms of plug-ins and routing, but you do have very low latency. This is what most people do, or they use an outboard mixer during tracking.

[SteveR]

Latency is nothing new. It's only more recently that very low latency cards have become affordable. USB is used by some people I know and they don't have a problem with it in their applications. I personally would save for a MOTU device... Expensive but much more serious as an audio in out tool... Don't expect much from the preamps apparently...


SteveR

[Rockycoon]

I use Sonar XL. This is a problem with certain operating systems. The best bet is to monitor with and external mixer. I would not have it any other way. Mine works fabulous. You have more control using this method (I think) It's a personal thing you know. You can get hung on a lot of this kinda stuff in the learning curve blues. It's like you got buy it, play with it, and go bummer, I figured out latency. Sounds like you doing the smart thing first. Good luck.

BB

[pooprobot]

Using a mixer during tracking is a great solution. That was the solution me and my friends came up with when I had a slow system with horrible latency, and I continue to track that way now, even though latency is no longer an issue.

[hmurchison]

The latency won't be that bad. Latency in the "seconds" would be unacceptable but normally you will notice latency of 20-30ms. Apple has developed a low latency I/O system for OSX but that won't help you for USB currently.

Think about this USB is 1.1 megabits per second throughput.
16bit/44k audio only takes up 150 kilobytes per second per mono stream. There is plenty of "tunnel" for USB provided the developer of the Hardware/Software programs their drivers with efficiency.