I decided to buy a low latency USB sound card: In Synthesia I only hit the notes 'Barely!' instead of 'Great!' or 'Perfect!' clearly because of the poor performance of the sound card and not because of mine. ;) The other problem was that because of the high latency I could only use my pad controller with my drum kit's built-in synthesizer which is not ideal.
I choose UGM-96 because of its small form-factor and because it doesn't require any external power. The low latency microphone input will be also handy if I ever organize a SingStar like party and the Cubase LE 4 and the free Virtual Guitar AMP it came with were also interesting add-ons: Cubase is the midi sequencer which I used ~10 years ago and some of my colleagues might have fun with the AMP if they ever bring their guitar over.
I also found out that there is a dedicated driver for my E-MU XMidi 1x1 Tab USB midi cabel. It has even lower latency compared to the default Windows driver. Using Cubase's soft synth also eliminated the low performance default midi synth of Windows. Using all of these Synthesia become much more easy to play! I also found out that Synthesia itself has a big latency so using my pad controller with Cubase and using the ASIO4ALL low latency driver with my built-in soundcard has good enough performance for real time drumming. Awesome! :)
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| ESI UGM96 and E-MU Xmidi 1x1 Tab |
Some more hints: The driver for UGM-96 is pretty crappy; it can handle one program at a time only, and the device does not always work in all USB sockets. The free ASIO4ALL driver is much better. You can switch the output device from the laptop sound card to UGM-96 on-the fly without exiting the audio program and the device works in any USB socket without many plug & un-plug of the device and exit & restart of the audio application.
