Q&A: Real-time usage
- Question
Dear Harmony4 developers, I am currently planning to pre-order Harmony4, but I have one question that has to be clarified before: Will Harmony4 work in realtime, that is, can it be used in the same way as your hardware harmony processors (that is, I play midi chords, record a vocal audio track in Cubase, and Harmony4 generates additional voices using the Midi chords as input)? What is known about latencies? I work with an up-to-date Notebook (2 Ghz Pentium, 1 Gb Ram, Powercore Compact, Cubase SX3 under WIndowsXP).
Thank you for your support - I'm looking forward to the release of the software.
Best regards,
Thomas Goschke, Germany
- Answer
Hello Thomas,
Thank you for the question. In a word, yes, it will work in real-time.
The Harmony4 plug-in will create harmony voices just as our other hardware products do. It will support all of our regular harmony modes, including chord mode which you were referring to. Of course, the question of real-time processing and latency is, on the surface, as innocent looking as an iceberg. Latency is something we are always battling against (for our hardware and software products). The type of signal processing we do requires that we first analyze the input audio before we can actually produce any output. For example, one of the key requirements for creating harmony is knowing what the singer’s pitch is. There is no way to do this without waiting for a “small” amount of audio to show up and then crunching through it to figure out what the pitch is. Once this process has started we’re running in real-time, but we’re behind just a little due to that initial pause we needed to straighten our bearings.
Now with a DAW the concept of real-time is a bit more pliable than with our hardware products. If you have your audio (and MIDI) pre-recorded and use Harmony4 as an insert or aux effect, the DAW will be able to compensate for the processing latency automatically. So when you hit the play button everything should be nicely aligned. In fact, if you’re using it this way latency is hopefully something you don’t need to worry about. On the other hand, if you want to monitor everything in real-time (more or less treat your DAW rig as a hardware effect processor) you will most likely notice the latency. And here enters another, more variable, aspect of latency – your specific DAW setup. The DAW software, OS version, audio card, ASIO driver, etc. will all impact the latency. But, Thomas I’m sure you and the other audiophiles out there are all too familiar with this.
As far as specific numbers go, I’m still trying to optimize the DSP processing latency; but at the moment the Harmony4 plug-in is introducing about 30 ms of latency.
Eugene Pretorius
Developer
Dear Harmony4 developers, I am currently planning to pre-order Harmony4, but I have one question that has to be clarified before: Will Harmony4 work in realtime, that is, can it be used in the same way as your hardware harmony processors (that is, I play midi chords, record a vocal audio track in Cubase, and Harmony4 generates additional voices using the Midi chords as input)? What is known about latencies? I work with an up-to-date Notebook (2 Ghz Pentium, 1 Gb Ram, Powercore Compact, Cubase SX3 under WIndowsXP).
Thank you for your support - I'm looking forward to the release of the software.
Best regards,
Thomas Goschke, Germany
- Answer
Hello Thomas,
Thank you for the question. In a word, yes, it will work in real-time.
The Harmony4 plug-in will create harmony voices just as our other hardware products do. It will support all of our regular harmony modes, including chord mode which you were referring to. Of course, the question of real-time processing and latency is, on the surface, as innocent looking as an iceberg. Latency is something we are always battling against (for our hardware and software products). The type of signal processing we do requires that we first analyze the input audio before we can actually produce any output. For example, one of the key requirements for creating harmony is knowing what the singer’s pitch is. There is no way to do this without waiting for a “small” amount of audio to show up and then crunching through it to figure out what the pitch is. Once this process has started we’re running in real-time, but we’re behind just a little due to that initial pause we needed to straighten our bearings.
Now with a DAW the concept of real-time is a bit more pliable than with our hardware products. If you have your audio (and MIDI) pre-recorded and use Harmony4 as an insert or aux effect, the DAW will be able to compensate for the processing latency automatically. So when you hit the play button everything should be nicely aligned. In fact, if you’re using it this way latency is hopefully something you don’t need to worry about. On the other hand, if you want to monitor everything in real-time (more or less treat your DAW rig as a hardware effect processor) you will most likely notice the latency. And here enters another, more variable, aspect of latency – your specific DAW setup. The DAW software, OS version, audio card, ASIO driver, etc. will all impact the latency. But, Thomas I’m sure you and the other audiophiles out there are all too familiar with this.
As far as specific numbers go, I’m still trying to optimize the DSP processing latency; but at the moment the Harmony4 plug-in is introducing about 30 ms of latency.
Eugene Pretorius
Developer
posted by TC-Helicon Development Team at
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
