Any ideas to reduce latency when using midi/soft synths?

[Kevin White]

I'm running audio through a Soundcraft Ui24 and the latency is set to 3 ms in CW - but when I play, there's at LEAST a 50ms delay between hitting the key and hearing the sound - rendering CW unusable to track midi in. You can't play along naturally.

I've been using a work around ... running soft synths in Cantabile, using a Tascam 4x4HR and then porting that output into the Soundcraft. It works, as there's NO latency issue in that program (none w/ the Soundcraft as source either) but it still doesn't give me a midi output I can record.

I used to be able to play in CW in real time w/o latency issues. 

Any thoughts where I might look to correct the problems I'm encountering?

Thanks in advance!!

[scook]

Try the FX button in the Mix Module.

When reading about FX bypass also review the PDC button description.

[Promidi]

What driver mode are you using? (ASIO is preferred).  What is your buffer size?

[John Vere]

As Scook said,  latency with midi is due to certain effects, mostly seems the heavy hitters like the LP Multiband type that use "look ahead" buffers. This causes the playback to be delayed even more than the reported latency of your ASIO driver.  There's actually no delay of the incoming midi data but it seems like there is.  Always bypass all effects while tracking both midi and Audio to avoid this issue. Also lower your audio buffers to 256 or 128 ms. Higher than that you might still "feel" a lag.