Hi Bill
Thanks,but that is what I did.

Bernie

Thanks, I've got it

Has anyone out there used OMB as an arranger to perform live?

For the past 2 days, I have been playing around with "One man band" and got it working with my PK-5 bass midi pedal and my laptop. I am using a MIDIMAN 2X2 as an interface between MIDI output on the PK-5 and the USB port on my laptop.

Is anyone else using a similar setup?

I notice a bit of latency and I wonder if shortening the USB cable from 10 feet to 3 feet would reduce the latency and also shorten the MIDI from 10 feet to 6 feet?

Since my laptop does not have a game port, is there a PCMCIA card out there with a MIDI input that I could connect my PK-5 to?

Don
steelguitarist@hotmail.com

------------------
Don Benoit
http://www.steelguitar.ca

The latency you are noticing comes from the software that is playing the sounds in your laptop. Length of USB or MIDI cables has no effect.

The only way to shorten the latency of the sound is to use a better sound card or interface, with lower latency ASIO drivers, or to use an external MIDI module (perhaps a Sonic Cell from Roland?) instead of internal sounds.

shortening those cables as you suggest will make no difference at all to latency...with one man band there can be major latency issues because of the huge data flows with some arranger styles...the only solution is the thin out the controller messages within OMB itself..its the reason i pretty much ditched OMB as a live tool, and went back to hardware arrangers.hope that helps..
cheers
dennis

Are you using the jmsynth that came with OMB?
I use it with an edirol pcr m80 controller and find it gives me the lowest latency.
I don't use asio or soft synths, mainly because I'm too lazy to learn all about how to use them, and I find this setup adequate for my simple needs.

Softsynths (just like real ones) come in all flavors of price and capabilities. An inexpensive one can no more be expected to respond as well, or sound as good, as a cheap hardware synth. Add to that the possibly limited horsepower from a lesser laptop, that may be struggling to play back styles developed for modern 128 voice arrangers, and a generic driver for a cheap internal soundcard, and you have a recipe for high latency and poor timing.

Just like most things, you get what you pay for. Latencies can get as low as 1.5ms with some pro audio interfaces, and modern Core Duo based laptops can breeze through 128 voice styles. But expecting hardware responsiveness when using built in audio on perhaps older laptops is not reasonable, IMO.

Thanks for letting us know about the update Jos. I have added a feature link on the front page of Synth Zone to let everyone know about the new version.


[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 10-14-2007).]

Thanks for all the replies.
There is no noticeable latency if I use the Jm synth or the VSC DXI.

I,ve got it all working with the Roland PK-5 bass pedals and I am able to change chords with the pedals. Now I need to fugure out how to program one of the pedals to stop the song. Does anyone know how?