Tue Aug 18, 2015 7:19 am
Hello Atugores,
The latency that Hauptwerk reports on its Audio, MIDI and Performance large control panel (e.g. 23 milliseconds with your chosen buffer size of 1024) is the latency that the audio driver reports. That doesn't take into account any additional MIDI latency that might exist.
Usually (with most MIDI interfaces and MIDI keyboards/consoles), the additional MIDI latency will be only a very small number of milliseconds (e.g. 2-3 ms in total). However, Hauptwerk has no means by which to determine that (you would need specialist hardware for doing so).
Hence the actual total amount of latency might be higher than the audio latency that Hauptwerk reports if you play via MIDI. However, if you click on keys on the screen then no additional MIDI latency will be present, so it gives you a means to hear the audio latency (23 ms) alone, in order to try to determine whether the 'problematic' latency is due to MIDI or audio.
A latency of 23 ms (for the default audio buffer size of 1024) is equivalent to playing a real pipe organ in which the pipework is only about 7.8 metres away from you (since sound travels at about 340 metres/second). Many real organs have pipework at least that far away, so most people consider that to be a problem (or even noticeable).
You can of course also choose a lower buffer size. For example, you could set the buffer size to 256, which would usually give you an audio latency (with the St. Anne's sample set, which uses a sample rate of 44.1 kHz) of about 6 milliseconds. That's equivalent to playing a real pipe organ in which the pipework is about 2 metres from you. Even the smallest real tracker organ is unlikely to have less latency than that.
Are you sure that you find that unplayable? With the Mac's built-in audio output selected in Hauptwerk, and with Hauptwerk's buffer size setting set to 256 you really shouldn't be able to hear any significant unnatural latency (i.e. any more than a real tracker organ).
With those settings, do you hear additional latency when you play by press the MIDI keys on your Roland/Rodgers organ, compared to clicking on the virtual keys on the screen? If so, then somehow you must have some source of excessive MIDI latency.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.