Bad latency

[moosegoose]

Garageband is the app I've been waiting years for. Wonderful.

But, I went out and bought an Edirol UA-20 audio capture USB box because the line-in level is so low just plugging a guitar straight into the back of my G4 Dual 867. OS 10.3.

I've fiddled with the settings, but even the very lowest latency I can achieve sounds terrible, and makes playing anything impossible. I can't believe musicians can actually use this.

All the literature, and recommendations on the internet say that this product has excellent reviews for latency.

What am I doing wrong?
Can anyone recommend specific settings?

[superbovine]

how much ram do you have?

[moosegoose]

G4 Dual 867 10.3
1.5GB RAM

Nothing else running when I use garageband.

[superbovine]

Anything on the Edirol site?

can you verify it is garageband? ie test it out on another program.

[johngstudio]

In GB preferences, try setting both the input and output source to your USB/audion interface. I noticed I had bad latency when trying to use the mac built-in speakers as the output source.

[moosegoose]

SUPERBOVINE
There's nothing on the website.

I posted a direct question to their support email address, but have heard nothing back.

JOHNGSTUDIO
I tried that, but still get unusable latency.

I have however found a workaround which is NOT to use the Edirol as a USB device, but to run it simply as a pre-amp.

I take the line out from it's phono outputs straight into the line-in on the mac. It works perfectly.

So I'm not using it as a capture device at all. The USB lead is simply providing power.

Shame, but at least it works.

[superwagon]

I had the same problem with my TASCAM US-122. I did the line-out thing, but realized that defeated the purpose of the USB box. So I went back just to USB, switch the Audio input "in GB" to my us-122 then I switched the "Optimized for:" to Better Performance (for G3). Even though I have a 1.33 G4 w/1GB ram, this solved the latency issue. I am sure there is still some latency, but I can hardly tell anymore.

Maybe GB has a bug in it's optimizations?

[superbovine]

if you read the readme file on the edirol site where you can download the asio drivers. it specifically states all the things you should do to operate the device and decrease the latency in the readme file.

http://download.edirol.com/drivers/mac/ua20_asio_readme.txt

you should look at the site more closely moosegoose

[moosegoose]

Thanks Superbovine

This 'read me note' came with the downloaded driver, and is repeated on the website. It offers no help to my specific problem since I automatically did everything it asked before beginning.

When I said "there's nothing on the Edirol website", I had already read this read me note a dozen times looking for something that will help.

This doesn't.