klausmogensen
PhantomDeejay wrote :
VirtualDJ (and /or Rekordbox DJ and/or Serato DJ) are powerless against this.
Unfortunately the "DJ" market (or even the audio production market) is very small for the big laptop manufacturers to pay any attention to.
Most of the time the latency issues are caused by badly written drivers. Some times form the manufacturers of various components, and some times from Microsoft itself.
We can bitch as much as we like, but Asus, or Gigabyte, or Dell, won't keep 5-10 extra developers employed, just to find out what "bug" causes this driver to work fine and the other to have a few ms latency more, when 99,999999% of the users won't notice/bother, and those developers better start working for the next product release a few months down the line.
Also the reason of those more frequent "out of the box" latency issues is that manufacturers are aiming more and more towards providing more efficient stuff, than providing more powerfull stuff.
So, in their new moto, it makes absolutely perfect sense to extend battery life by 10 minutes in expense of having 0,0000001% users affected with higher latency.
Remember, latency is a bitch for us, but it's not something most users will be affected by. And latency is not a matter of raw power either. You can get the faster processor in the world, put it on a system with poorly written chipset drivers (and/or other drivers as well) and end up with a system that will get beaten (to latency terms) by a 5 year old mid range PC :P
Yes, searching for a laptop that's capable of real time audio processing with low latency is not an easy task, despite it shouldn't be.
Unfortunately the "DJ" market (or even the audio production market) is very small for the big laptop manufacturers to pay any attention to.
Most of the time the latency issues are caused by badly written drivers. Some times form the manufacturers of various components, and some times from Microsoft itself.
We can bitch as much as we like, but Asus, or Gigabyte, or Dell, won't keep 5-10 extra developers employed, just to find out what "bug" causes this driver to work fine and the other to have a few ms latency more, when 99,999999% of the users won't notice/bother, and those developers better start working for the next product release a few months down the line.
Also the reason of those more frequent "out of the box" latency issues is that manufacturers are aiming more and more towards providing more efficient stuff, than providing more powerfull stuff.
So, in their new moto, it makes absolutely perfect sense to extend battery life by 10 minutes in expense of having 0,0000001% users affected with higher latency.
Remember, latency is a bitch for us, but it's not something most users will be affected by. And latency is not a matter of raw power either. You can get the faster processor in the world, put it on a system with poorly written chipset drivers (and/or other drivers as well) and end up with a system that will get beaten (to latency terms) by a 5 year old mid range PC :P
Yes, searching for a laptop that's capable of real time audio processing with low latency is not an easy task, despite it shouldn't be.
Thank you for this post
it's not an easy message to get across to the average laptop user who wants to run DJ software
Posted Wed 08 May 24 @ 12:17 pm
locoDog
I honestly think people forget the teething problems.
I've never had out of the box perfect, there's always been a load of initial config.
But it's one of those headaches in the first week and then you get years of good performance and you forget it happened.
If you're "time's money" guy want off the shelf perfect, then you want a guy, you want to be friends with local an independent computer store and you'll pay the premium for his time to find you the thing.
I've never had out of the box perfect, there's always been a load of initial config.
But it's one of those headaches in the first week and then you get years of good performance and you forget it happened.
If you're "time's money" guy want off the shelf perfect, then you want a guy, you want to be friends with local an independent computer store and you'll pay the premium for his time to find you the thing.
Posted Wed 08 May 24 @ 12:25 pm
PhantomDeejay wrote :
Yes, searching for a laptop that's capable of real time audio processing with low latency is not an easy task, despite it shouldn't be.
Thank you for your response and I understand why it is happening, I just hate the time eaten up for something that shouldn't be so hard. I have ordered two more laptops (an Asus ROG with a 13th gen i5 and a 4050, and a MSI Katana with a 12th gen i7 and a 4060) to try one more time to stick with a Windows platform and hopefully save myself a couple grand before I go the macbook pro route. I am not looking for the fastest or highest end hardware, just reliability and realtime stems.
Posted Wed 08 May 24 @ 6:17 pm
kradcliffe
Some Macbook M series laptop users are having issues too. Reporting they have to switch the wifi off to stop the music glitching.
Posted Wed 08 May 24 @ 6:36 pm
djles.co.uk
I've never heard of this Keith.
My 14" M1 MacBook Pro has worked flawlessly for almost 2 years. I put a video up over a year ago with VDJ outputting Music Videos while running many other programs simultaneously without any issues or slowing down. It is still running fantastically with VirtualDJ 2024 and can run Stems 2.0 flawlessly. Oh, and I have a subscription with the Tidal DJ extension, so far I've only used it once for that odd request at a gig. I have over 60 tunes downloaded in the offline locker. All works as it should, lovin' it.😊
My 14" M1 MacBook Pro has worked flawlessly for almost 2 years. I put a video up over a year ago with VDJ outputting Music Videos while running many other programs simultaneously without any issues or slowing down. It is still running fantastically with VirtualDJ 2024 and can run Stems 2.0 flawlessly. Oh, and I have a subscription with the Tidal DJ extension, so far I've only used it once for that odd request at a gig. I have over 60 tunes downloaded in the offline locker. All works as it should, lovin' it.😊
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 2:12 am
MixMaker
I've never encountered significant problems with two Sony VAIOs with first versions of VDJ and lately with three Asus ROGs with newest versions of VDJ; the most recent model, from last year, continues to perform exceptionally well, I can even navigate facebook and do some other stuff while DJing using videos with steams included. My standard procedure upon unboxing a laptop is to update the BIOS, format the disk, and perform a clean Windows installation with the latest drivers, eliminating the preinstalled bloatware, of course, I only use the laptop for DJing exclusively.
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 2:53 am
kradcliffe
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 5:27 am
I have one test left to run but it seems the Asus ROG Strix 16 with an i5 and 4050 is the winner. Decent latency with no audio artifacts or any other weird behaviour. I am going to hook it up to some club gear later just to rule out any weird usb behaviour when running 3 devices simultaneously but otherwise, I am cautiously optimistic that my search is over till next time (hopefully 5-10 years from now )
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 4:04 pm
kradcliffe
I got an Asus Zenbook Pro 16X Oled laptop with RTX4080 for video editing.
Wasn't great out of the box but after changing the power and processor settings it seems to be OK.
I know it's the lay of the land now but having to delve deep in to settings just to get decent latency is a hassle that shouldn't be there.
Wasn't great out of the box but after changing the power and processor settings it seems to be OK.
I know it's the lay of the land now but having to delve deep in to settings just to get decent latency is a hassle that shouldn't be there.
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 7:24 pm
We have a winner! ROG Strix 16 seems well built and still stable with decent latency, even after finishing all the updates and what not. In a 4 hour test it had one or two very short DPC spikes to about 1500 micro seconds but neither caused any weird behaviour or impacted the audio stream. Worked with the CDJ 3000s and A9 flawlessly with no messing around.
BIG sigh of relief that I can get back to work on prepping for wedding/party season and stop worrying about this. Thanks for all the input everyone.
BIG sigh of relief that I can get back to work on prepping for wedding/party season and stop worrying about this. Thanks for all the input everyone.
Posted Thu 09 May 24 @ 9:22 pm
kradcliffe
Sounds good. Can you post a screenshot of your DPC latency as I did above as a comparison?
Posted Fri 10 May 24 @ 8:38 am
PhantomDeejay
I don't think sharing Latencymon screenshots means anything actually.
Latencymon is a tool to help you fix your issues.. IF YOU HAVE ISSUES!
What I mean, is that there are plenty of cases out there where according to Latencymon, a system should not be capable of handling realtime audio. YET, that system performs absolutely fine!
I personally had such a system for 5 years.
It would produce a high DPC spike every 90 seconds, like clockwork.
Yet, I was able to run almost all controllers at 256 samples latency on it without any issues ever.
So, keep that in mind when you're setting up a system. Don't be obsessed with "the green valley" of Latencymon. Instead use the tool for what it is: A troubleshooting tool! If you have issues it can help you identify their cause, and possibly help you to fix them.
Latencymon is a tool to help you fix your issues.. IF YOU HAVE ISSUES!
What I mean, is that there are plenty of cases out there where according to Latencymon, a system should not be capable of handling realtime audio. YET, that system performs absolutely fine!
I personally had such a system for 5 years.
It would produce a high DPC spike every 90 seconds, like clockwork.
Yet, I was able to run almost all controllers at 256 samples latency on it without any issues ever.
So, keep that in mind when you're setting up a system. Don't be obsessed with "the green valley" of Latencymon. Instead use the tool for what it is: A troubleshooting tool! If you have issues it can help you identify their cause, and possibly help you to fix them.
Posted Fri 10 May 24 @ 10:53 am
PhantomDeejay wrote :
I don't think sharing Latencymon screenshots means anything actually.
Latencymon is a tool to help you fix your issues.. IF YOU HAVE ISSUES!
What I mean, is that there are plenty of cases out there where according to Latencymon, a system should not be capable of handling realtime audio. YET, that system performs absolutely fine!
I personally had such a system for 5 years.
It would produce a high DPC spike every 90 seconds, like clockwork.
Yet, I was able to run almost all controllers at 256 samples latency on it without any issues ever.
So, keep that in mind when you're setting up a system. Don't be obsessed with "the green valley" of Latencymon. Instead use the tool for what it is: A troubleshooting tool! If you have issues it can help you identify their cause, and possibly help you to fix them.
Latencymon is a tool to help you fix your issues.. IF YOU HAVE ISSUES!
What I mean, is that there are plenty of cases out there where according to Latencymon, a system should not be capable of handling realtime audio. YET, that system performs absolutely fine!
I personally had such a system for 5 years.
It would produce a high DPC spike every 90 seconds, like clockwork.
Yet, I was able to run almost all controllers at 256 samples latency on it without any issues ever.
So, keep that in mind when you're setting up a system. Don't be obsessed with "the green valley" of Latencymon. Instead use the tool for what it is: A troubleshooting tool! If you have issues it can help you identify their cause, and possibly help you to fix them.
I agree whole heartedly. When running a prolonged test, I saw averages that were well below the threshold of concern but an occasional spike to 700-1500 which did not impact the audio stream in any way. To the graph already posted, that was a 1 minute mark test, hardly conclusive of maximums and still only tells us that some processes might be executing longer...but that doesn't automatically point to a problem with audio processing.
Posted Sat 11 May 24 @ 12:19 am