Contribution by Janne Laine

On our new Sync Tank page Janne Laine describes how he configured his system to keep audio in sync with midi under Logic Audio Platinum.

Contribution by Klaus Pellny

The Emagic support gave me the following tips that worked perfectly:

• In 'settings for the EWS64XL synthesizer': number of wave-play channels 2, number of virtual midi devices 0, wave play buffer latency 5ms.
• In 'MMsetup' (Logic directory): EWS64XL WavePlay #1 number of drivers 2, channels per Driver 2, interpolate checked.
• In 'Logic preferences': PCAV multi checked, playback driver EWS1.

Contribution by Henry Klagges 990117

you have to run the EWS in polling mode to work at all with Logic Audio. With interrupt on you can have jumps of thousands of samples (25+ milliseconds).

With LAW 2.5.7, sync with the EWS and other Windoof MME cards was extremely good. Since 2.6.9 introduced a new PAD (logic portable audio driver), sync between *any* MME card and LAW has been flaky.

We've told Emagic about this problem in excruciating detail over and over and over for a whole fucking year, backed up by long measurements that cost *a lot* of time and money to make.

As far as I can tell, they didn't do much about it (they tried, but to no avail). It has to be said though, that MME sync IS really hard to do. But, as their own old driver from 2.5.7 works very very well with MME (including the EWS), I suspect it's not always Microsoft who's to blame.

This means you're either lucky with your setup, or can't use LAW properly. My solution was to buy an Emagic Audiowerk 8, which syncs sample-accurate all the time. It has other drawbacks, but at least the timing problem is a goner.
1000 DM is a lot of money just to improve sync, though. And the fact that Logic has no parameters to adjust the AW8 playback and record delays is plainly *ridiculous*. It's dead easy to program and would save a lot of menial labour.

Not all people who use LAW with MME are aware of this problem. Often, they don't get the gross sync errors that the EWS has with the interrupt on. They only get the random MME variations on the order of 4-5 milliseconds. You don't hear that straight away all the time, or think that *you* made timing mistakes, or that the music just vaguely sounds worse than it should or did when you played it. In reality the bad sync is to blame.

Contribution by Bjarne Andersen 981003

I am running Logic Audio 3.5 platinium with rather good sync. (I have a K6-200 MHz - 96 Mb RAM)

This is how to do it:

• Run your EWS in polling mode (no IRQ for the synth)
• Enable only one wave-device (the virtual channels shurely don´t run with LOGIC AUDIO).
• Make the delay-settings for record and playback as described in the manual.

Now I can run around 8 tracks and lots of midi. (My next problem is when I add som Direct-X plug-ins my proccessor is to slow)

Older contributions:

Roland Brehm reports the following problem: "Since I updated to Logic 3.5 I have sync problems with Logic and the EWS64. Following message appears on the screen when I want to play audio:

' Error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI. Sample Rate 39767 recognized. Check conflict between LOGIC Audio and external devices.'

The 39767 change all the time from 30000 to 40000. I read about switching the card into polling mode. I don't want to do so."

Philip Köster contributed: "I'm not a Logic user so I cant really help you out here. But what I do know is that TT urgently suggest using the EWS in polling mode for use with Logic. Don't ask me why ..."

Maybe other users can elaborate more on this topic.

Harald Krytinar is a Logic user. He did research on the sync problem of Logic, which resulted in an illustrated 'Problem report'. There is a comprehensive explanation on his site.

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Latest update on page: 25-04-99