OLD school: connecting a modern MIDI keybord to Sibelius 6 (windows 10)

[bipolar-one]

On 9/11/01 I began writing my senior college graduation piece with a Yamaha P35? MIDI-d into a vintage windows computer using Sibelius 1.2 software. Now, at age 58, I'm trying to potentially write opus 2, having just discovered how to post original stuff on YouTube. I am having terrible "latency" issues. I'm old school...just want to do what I did at the turn of the century when I didn't have this problem. Most keyboards now have USB outputs...old midi is pretty much history. If so, I want a MIDI 88 note weighted keyboard like I had in my early 40s. If not, how can I speed up the process so I can do what I did back in the day? The computer of I have is a windows 10 HP laptop 500 g hard drive 4 gig ram and some sort of AMD processor. I'm not real techy...just an old spontaneous composer. And a permanently disabled USA veteran on social security.

Thank you.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Latency problems tend to originate with the audio driver.

If you don't have a genuine ASIO audio driver for your sound card, you can install the free ASIO4ALL driver to see how much it helps; it isn't an actual ASIO driver, just an emulation of sorts, but it can make a noticeable difference in the amount of latency.

Note that you'll most likely also need to adjust the audio buffer settings for your audio driver; you'll want to set the size of the buffer to a smaller value. What this does is keep the audio data moving at a faster rate, because if the audio buffer is larger then the audio data will take longer to fill up the buffer before getting passed along. You'll need to try different buffer sizes to see how small of an audio buffer you can use and still get good audio.

Are you currently using a keyboard controller, or just clicking the mouse on a virtual keyboard in your DAW? And if you need to get an actual keyboard controller, how much of a budget can you afford?

 

[Biggles]

Welcome.

Unfortunately as you have probably found alreadyuy MIDI 88 note weighted keyboard controllers do not come cheap.

An Arturia Keylab mk2 88 is c$750 new or a Native Instruments S88 is over $1k.

If you are after one then eBay or Craigs List may have something suitable.

Your Laptop should be OK for your needs and the advice Michael gave will solve any issues you have with latency.

Two items of software will help, the first is Audacity which is freeware and is a general single and multi track recorder. The second is a fully fledged DAW called Cakewalk, it is also free and if you navigate to the BandLab website, Register with them and then download and install Cakewalk. There are plenty of Video Tutorials online on using Cakewalk.

Off the wall, if you search out music groups near you and your local U3A then you may find people like minded who can help and some may even have a surplus of kit.

Here in the UK we have plenty of shops who receive donations and sell on the goods to raise money for specific causes like Save The Children, Oxfam, Salvation Army, or our local Hospice, these shops often have keyboards for sale at very low prices, so maybe there are something similar near you.

Good luck

 

[b3maniac]

Welcome to the forums. I have a DAW set-up that is over 13 years old now. I run Win XP DAW on a basic computer with just a few modifications.
I found sites/articles on how to optimize Win XP and enhance the hardware. I'm pretty sure that you can probably do the
same thing. I would start by comparing the Sibelius system requirements with your laptop hardware, and go from there to be sure you meet at least the minimum hardware requirements.
Michael's recommendations cover very important points to getting the system working and I would also recommend that you do a search on "how to optimize my Win 10 laptop for music production". They give tips on how to set-up resource usage on your laptop to free resources and help speed up Win 10. I would hope this would get you a point where you're able to set-up and "tune-in" settings to be able to use your system. If you run into something you aren't sure about, that's where Google and Youtube can come in handy. And,there are the many Forums too (Link below). Don

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