What's the best way to reduce latency in Windows 10?

Trouble with Synthesia, your keyboard, or adapter? Think you found a bug?
When describing problems, always mention your OS and game version (shown at the bottom of the title screen).

If your keyboard has USB or MIDI ports, there is a tremendously high chance (>99%) it will work with Synthesia. See what you'll need on the keyboards page.
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WeApOn
Posts: 63

Post by WeApOn »

Hi,

Been a while since I tried to reduce latency on my MIDI keyboard to Synthesia; I had been previously using the old method of ASIO4ALL & CoolSoftMidi, but lately I had been using the built-in MIDI synthesizer.

What is the latest known best way to reduce latency? My keypresses are just a bit lagged and I'd love to get it minimized.

Thanks!
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

The best way to reduce latency is to direct the MIDI Out from Synthesia to the MIDI In of your keyboard and rely on the hardware synthesizer of your keyboard to produce audio, assuming your keyboard has the capability of producing sound of course.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
WeApOn
Posts: 63

Post by WeApOn »

Unfortunately my keyboard does not have that ability. What would be the second best option, noting that Windows needs to be the one producing the sounds?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I tested it a few years ago and the built-in synth is close to as good as it gets today if you don't have a synth built into your MIDI controller.

I'm hoping to get test proper ASIO support for the built-in synth soon, but even using WASAPI, it's not nearly as bad as Microsoft's synth. If someone has real hardware ASIO, that will be able to squeeze it down even farther once it's in. (Presumably, anyway. I'll measure it, too, to see for sure.)

That said, I also measured an extra ~10ms or so that is my fault on top of any device's latency. I'd also like to get that fixed.
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