EIC Grand Piano!

I finally installed the EIC Grand Piano after doing some extensive disk cleanup. It needs almost 4GB of disk space! Anyway, here's what I found:

1) De-fragment your disk! I was having trouble playing the Grand Piano preset without stuttering. The samples are stored in two huge files, which evidently were fragmented all over the place. While trying to play simple parts, the audio would stutter. CPU usage was very low, but the disk activity light was on alot. After de-fragging the drive, it almost plays perfectly.

2) It sounds much nice than the Grand Piano LE when listening in stereo (I'm using earbuds at home.) I really like it. However, as a test, I put the Mono Utility Device after the Grand Piano and compared it to the Grand Piano LE - there wasn't too much difference. Yet, the LE version taxes the system much less. So for playing live, where you're not sending stereo, you can save a lot of space and disk usage by just using the LE version. However, for making recordings, then you can swap the full version and get a really nice stereo image.

Change Services to Manual Startup

I am trying to optimize my laptop for music use, and the accepted wisdom is to shut down any services that are not needed. So, here is a list of what I shut down, and any consequences of doing so. This list will grow as I try to create a lean-mean music machine!

I read somewhere to change "Help and Support Service" to manual startup, so I did so. Also, did the same with Adobe Active File Monitor (I have Photoshop Elements installed on this machine.) So far, no problems!

Better Performance than factory ASIO driver for Lexicon Lambda

I'm using the Lexicon Lambda audio interface and the factory supplied ASIO driver is terrible - the latency is unusable for playing VSTs live (40 - 60 ms). Instead, I'm using ASIO4All and have my latency around 9ms (144 samples). I wish it was better, but it is stable on my Dell Inspiron 6000 running XP. It would be nice if the factory supplied driver worked better, because I'm not sure what extra layers ASIO4ALL is going thru, but the net result is much better.

Here's how to set up the Preferences in Live - Go to the Audio tab, and select:
Driver Type = ASIO
Audio Device = ASIO4ALL v2



Then click on Hardware Setup which will bring up the ASIO4ALL control panel:



In the left hand column, highlight the on-board sound device, and click Disable. Then highlight the Alpha and click Enable. If you are not recording but just playing, you might find better results if you just enable the "Out" part of the Alpha and not the "In" since you don't need the input to play. Then, with the Alpha highlighted, you can adjust the ASIO buffer size.

I like to run things this way, because my on board audio is freed up if I need to go into some other app Ii.e iTunes), or if the system is trying to get my attention audibly. The Lexicon interface is dedicated to running Live.

Two other things I do to improve stabililty is to disable the radio on my wireless networking, and also to install SpeedswitchXP and set the AC performance to "Max Performance." This seems to get every last drop of processing power directed at my audio synthesis.

It would be nice if Lexicon will create a low-latency native ASIO driver for their devices, because obviously it can be done! I don't know the cost of going thru the WDM driver layer, but the net result is much better than the factory driver.