Hi all, I'm new to these forums. Forgive me if you've heard all this before, I did search but no-one seems to be specifically answering my issue...
In the past I've recorded guitar into a PC with a M-Audio Delta 66 interface and a Pod Xt Pro, using Sonar as my sequencer. I've recently bought a Mac, an 1.8 G5 with 1.25Gb RAM and am thinking of switching to using it for audio recording.
I was at the 'Guitarists and the Mac' seminar in London recently, which was great. They clearly demonstrated that it is possible to monitor software plugin effects in real-time and record them. Now, I don't know if they were just adapting to the latency of the system, but I REALLY need to hear my processed sound in real time or I just can't play worth a damn (yeah, maybe I should just practice more!). On the PC I coped by also routing the Pod's auxiliary outputs through my mixer.
Anyway, I tried plugging my Pod into the Mac via USB, and using GarageBand to record the dry signal using one of the built-in guitar effects, monitor on, and the latency was absolutely awful...
So (finally) to my issue... Is it really possible to get close-to-real-time monitoring of software effects? Even with the best audio hardware, surely some latency must be present due to the CPU applying effects, etc, or is that fast enough to be negligible?
Ideally I'd like to ditch the Pod and move to a more flexible, all-software solution. I'm prepared to shell out for Logic Express at least, and a decent audio interface if my existing M-Audio card isn't compatible (I believe it should be). However, I really don't want to go down that route just to find out that I have to live with a degree of latency I can't accept...
Dan.
