So personally, i have my beautiful and trusty Korg karma and triton but my fashion inclined girlfriend has now decided she would like to be piano inclined.. so before i got my triton, i played shows (metal band) with a midi controller (m audio 88es) and a mac book running logic 8 for sounds. though not the biggest fan of the logic samples, she wants to see if shell get good at piano to actualy buy a keyboard (probably a psr or something..) so im gifting her my midi controller for a whioe, now your thinking hey why not let her use logic? well its cuz shes a windows user! and i dont know whats out there that is FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE or easily torrented. ive found a few basic one but the latency (delay) is HORRENDOUS and obviosly dont want that to discourage her. her computer is adequete but possibly not the best... i have USB cables as well a usb - midi interface that i can lend her but i want to know what program i can use that gives a low latency even if its just on record mode or whatever (sum stop delay when you press record) doesnt need to be a complicated thing.. just sumthing with a basic no good piano sound will do... so please telll meee!!!!!!!! will be greatly apreciated! i used logic, so i assume sum recording programs might be good, but cant be a protools sized program..
If you want to go down the software path you could try Native Instruments Kore Player or Reason. I think the best way would be to go for a stand alone electric piano like a Yamaha YDPS30 or NP30. Or midi your M Audio 88 to your Karma. Hope this was some help.
Ide midi it to my karma if i has a 50 mile (litterally) midi cable.. hahaha but thanks for the idea does native or reason have a good latency? and be good for a computer thats not so hot but still runs XP?
She's probably getting low latency because she doesn't have a proper audio interface, not because the software is particularly slow. Though obviously, using software that has very high processor needs on a slow computer will also cause latency, though this comes across more in the form of audio buffer underruns (the computer can't keep up with the need to always have data in the audio buffer), which would sound like crackles. If everything sounds great but it's just delayed, that almost certainly means she needs an audio interface with good drivers rather than a standard sound card.
Even with really cheap MIDI to USB adapters, latency can be significantly reduced by installing ASIO4ALL (free ASIO driver for Windows).
ASIO4ALL won't help with MIDI adapters. ASIO is an audio driver format, so it would help with latency on your PC's onboard sound card. The speed of the MIDI data getting into the computer should be fast regardless of what hardware and drivers you use.