VG-99 - Bad Vista drivers or its my system?

[jassy]

Im starting to use my laptop (XPS 1640 vista premium, 3,06 ghz, 4gb 1066 ram) with the VG99 to play softsynths and route audio to it to play live. Initially (IIRC) the behaviour was good, but today when I restarted to use it more seriously (installing more plugins and preparing it to play live) Im having a bad behaviour of the driver, I will explain:

Only launching a vst host (I tried 3) and using the vg99 usb asio driver without running any vsti or vst I get big cpu spikes. Its not a costant but something periodic, every 15 seconds it jumps from 1% to 51%!  Oviously it produces problems when using it playing vstis and effects. When the cpu jumps to 51% I get clicks or stops briefly the audio signal.

In this new laptop I cant install XP (not drivers for it, thanks Dell!) so Im linked to Vista. I tried everything, tunning the system, updating drivers and stoping all type of devices I could imagine. But those spikes only appear when Im using the vg99 asio drivers.

Can someone confirm this bad behaviour in Vista?? or help me to solve this??

I need to know to clarify if its my system or its the normal behaviour of this driver.

I expect to solve this because I would love to go live only with the vg99 and my laptop as its very convenient and I can avoid to have another soundcard and midi interface, cables, etc etc.

In the other hand I have tried the usb driver to play sofsynths in my old notebook (core duo 2,16 ghz -not core2duo-) using XP and the results where surprisingly good, ultra low latency (4ms) and low cpu hit (around a 8% of one core which is not so bad with that small latency).
Being able to play virtual instruments with that low latency has been very pleasant, in fact I thing the VG99 is one of the best, if not the best, guitar to midi systems I tried (I tried many and at this time I own an Axon and a gr30), very consistent response, very few glitches, not double triggering, etc (I will probably talk about it in another thread).

Any help would be very appreciate.

Thanks in advance.

here is a jpg of how it appears in the task meter 

[jassy]

No one want to share their experiences with the vg99 as an usb audio/midi interface?

I have been doing some more research, just in case someone is interested:

I have tried another usb audio card (jamlab) in this new laptop and the problem is gone, no cpu spikes at all (at 4 ms latency), so the problem seems to be related with the usb audio/midi driver of the vg99 in Vista (has I have mentioned in XP its much better).



So please if you have tried to work with the vg99 usb driver and tried the lowests latencies possible (in order to play in realtime), please comment how it worked to you

Thanks

.

[Brent Flash]

So please if you have tried to work with the vg99 usb driver and tried the lowests latencies possible (in order to play in realtime), please comment how it worked to you

My Mac works great! 

Oh.....That's not what you wanted to know. Sorry!

[Elantric]

Try using the Vista driver for the Edirol UA-4FX - which is known to use the same USB chipset as VG-99 for  USB audio/MIDI interface

https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php/topic,1696.msg9338.html#msg9338

[jassy]

My Mac works great! 

Oh.....That's not what you wanted to know. Sorry!

Im glad for you, almost one thing is better in Mac!  

back on the topic:

Im suspecting about a not very good Roland quality in the drivers area, so Im also interested if they are really good in mac also, and also in how much "great" is "great" for you.
What latency are you using and how much cpu hit can you do before to have clicks and pops?
In this case we need the most low latency possible if we want to play. its not a driver for mixing...

pd: its paradoxical, but its know that the usb works better in the macs than in the pcs where it was created.

[jassy]

Try using the Vista driver for the Edirol UA-4FX - a USB audio/MIDI interface ?

Do you think it would work? you tried that?

[aliensporebomb]

Just an update:  I've never had problems playing real-time with my Mac G5 but it's an overbuilt dual processor
liquid cooled 2.5 ghz system with 7 gigs of ram and about 1.7 TB of drive space.

Yeah, overbuilt.

[jassy]

Just an update:  I've never had problems playing real-time with my Mac G5 but it's an overbuilt dual processor
liquid cooled 2.5 ghz system with 7 gigs of ram and about 1.7 TB of drive space.

Yeah, overbuilt.

Cool, could you explain at what latency (I think the lowest is 64 samples) and how behaved the driver?

Im not saying that I cant play at the lowest latency (even in "devil Vista") but in this case I can only play with light sofsynths, because  the driver cause  big cpu spikes and this limits very much the use of the system and then its not possible to play with synths that demand too much cpu or layer many synths. Thats why Im asking about how performs with some detail.

Thanks in advance.

[aliensporebomb]

I just set it at the default latency (I'll check it when I get back home).

As far as softsynths, I had different sounds on every string and it sounded like a bleeding orchestra.

The only issue I had was when I was running Boinc / Seti @ Home in the background and it was causing a little
problem when running things like the bigger softsynths.  That app pegs both cpus at 100%.

All the examples below are live (and kind of stupid actually musically except for the last one).

Here's an audio demo of when I was running Seti @ home and it still worked decent:

with Omnisphere.

Then I realized I could probably get better performance if I shut the big CPU hog number cruncher off
and did this:


Then I did this a little later which is:
-standard audio guitar
-hrm guitar from vg99
-midi out to korg legacycell fake lead guitar
-midi out to garageband crotales
-midi out to garageband bells
-midi out to garageband synth bass
-I had one other synth and I can't quite recall what it was though...


Then I did this just before the bridge on my guitar needed some work:


That's guitar, hrm guitar (nashville tuning), synth bass, strings, sampled choir, lead guitar etc.
It's all live except I added the lead guitar later.

And that was just my first week playing with this, I'm kind of on hiatus since family is in town from
out of the country and it's been a food festival every night. 

[jassy]

Dont know (dont remember it as inmediately I change that to put it lower), but Im sure the default setting is not the lowest at all. You dont notice latency?? I cant play comfortably synths if the latency is more than 128 samples (half that if you are processing audio trough the computer).
Anyway thanks for your detailed answer!

[MichaelS]

Try using the Vista driver for the Edirol UA-4FX - a USB audio/MIDI interface ?

I downloaded this UA-4FX driver and installed it but I do not know how to get my Host software (ableton to recognise it or set it up with the VG99.  My experience is that the driver only finishes the installation when you plug in the hardware that it matches.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to make it work?

I cannot get the VG99 to work as an audio interface without glitches unless the latency is around 32ms.  I have tried light midi load and shutting down other applications.

I have to use another audio interface to make it work ok (M-audio Black Box).  With this the latency is around 8ms which is acceptable and no glitches.

My laptop is Asus Duo 2.1GHz 4GB (MV51Vseries)
Regards
Michael

[MichaelS]

Apologies for not reading ALL information in forum!!

I found the instructions for the UA-$FX driver in the other topics
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php/topic,1696.msg9338.html#msg9338
I followed instructions and got it to work ok.
It is somewhat better but not as good as the M-Audio Black Box driver.
It also seems to be better when run through ASIO4ALL.  Latency 10ms audio and 2 soft synths running.  Still a few glitches.  I can run the M-Audio hardware with the wireless internet turned on but not the roland driver.
I will keep testing

[jassy]

I have just tried that ua-4fx driver. It does exactly the same than the vg99 driver (huge spikes every 12 sec.), I think in fact its the same driver, same version (1.0), etc.
To use it in Win64 can be a solution but not for the problem that Im reporting, sadly not.

[Elantric]

turn off your WiFi

[jassy]

turn off your WiFi

I turned off so many things, also wifi of course, nothing cured that behaviour.

Just to update this thread, I managed to install win XP pro in my new laptop (dell xps16) and all those cpu spikes have vanished (now its a constant 9% in the task manager cpu meter without jumps). Same computer, same device/driver, but very different results. Im very much convinced already that the problem is the vg99 vista driver, it seems a disaster, I hope Roland would do something better soon.

Edit to add that I tried some of my most cpu demanding patches which was impossible to play with vista, even I have duplicate those! and pushing the cpu to 60% (one core, the hosts dont support multicore) and there are not clicks or pops, in conclusion the XP driver is MUCH better than the vista one, at least in my experience. Im now much more happy, I can run the driver at the lowest latency and push the cpu hard without artifacts.

Now seems that my dream is coming true, if we want to play live and add with virtual synths, the VG99 and a computer is the only thing we need, no additional sound card or midi interface, very good latency and guitar to midi converter and, of course, all the amazing sounds that the VG99 can produce itself, at least in windows XP if you are a pc user.