Ms Pinky First impressions/U46DJ crosstalk?/Binky Toy?

[tgerdin]

Hi everyone,



I got my Pinky system last night and thought I'd write down some first impressions. I bought a U46DJ to go with it and the of my setup is a 1 GHz alu powerbook running OS X 10.3.9, two SL1200 MK2 turntables and a cheap BST 2-channel mixer.



All in all the system (as in "the vinyl tracking") seems very solid and smooth. I haven't played around too much with I/O buffers but the latency seems sufficiently low for me (I'm no master turntablist.. YET!).



The only problem I've run into is that of hearing annoyingly loud levels of the vinyl control signal. When the output signal from the software (binky toy, maxi-patch) is low you clearly hear it. It's not only from the turntables since it's also present in for instance the headphone monitoring the mixer inputs. I hope I can find a way to solve or atleast reduce the problem but only explanation I can think of is that of crosstalk inside the U46 box which makes it kind of hard to do anything about it. Any other U46 user that has experienced anything similar? (Note: I do no think there's any "audio-through" going on since it's unchecked in Maxi-Patch and I suppose BinkyToy doesn't allow it at all. Enabling audio-through in Maxi-Patch logically makes the vinyl control signals really loud.)



Since my interest is in audio I think I would prefer to use Binky Toy instead of Maxi-Patch (mostly because of the simpler interface and bigger waveform displays). Moreover, Binky Toy does not seem to crash while permanently using U46DJ as the audio unit like Maxi-Patch does (as documentened in another thread in audio converter forum). Because of this I suspect that maybe Maxi-Patch could be fixed to prevent these startup crashes? Anyways, is Binky Toy discontinued in favor of Maxi Patch AO? One thread in the Binky Toy forum hinted that there were some major Tiger-esque (heavier use of the Core Audio framework) rewrite of Binky Toy to come -- is this true? Personally, I would really appreciate a new and improved Binky Toy. Would be really nice with AAC support (right now I'm transcoding AAC files I bought to MP3 - not pretty).



Anyways, thanks for a mighty cool system!





A plus tard,



Tobias

[dlpinkstah]

Well, I'm glad you like BinkyToy. I'm sure it will survive in some form...



To get rid of that audio feed-through, use the OSX "Audio MIDI Setup" utility program. Set the input levels for the U46DJ to the minimum and the feed-through problem should go away. For some reason, the input level controls that are exposed via "Audio MIDI Setup" actually control the audio feedthrough levels. Setting those to minimum still allows the signal from

the turntable to go into BinkyToy (or Maxi-Patch) for control purposes.



I also must strongly recommend that you upgraded your OS to Tiger. Especially since you're using the U46DJ. It works a lot better under Tiger.



See this posting:



http://www.mspinky.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=237

[tgerdin]

Thanks a lot for the tip, solved the problem! Definately a bit misleading labelling audio feed-through levels as "channel input levels".



As for U46DJ and Tiger, what is it that really works better than in Panther? After killing those input levels as you suggested the U46 works perfect for me (even without external 9V supply). I have tried Tiger and haven't really found any new feature (or combinations thereof) motivating *me* to fork out $150. But then again, if there would be a radically cool Tiger-CoreAudio supercharged BinkyToy, the upgrade would look a whole lot more interesting!



-Tobias

[dlpinkstah]

The reason I strongly suggest Tiger for use with Ms Pinky + U46DJ is that when I tested the U46DJ under OSX 10.3.9 I found that the audio I/O latency would gradually increase over the course of about 30 minutes of operation to an annoyingly high level. The only solution I found was to press the "kick start" button in Binky Toy Audio I/O window every 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately, that introduces a pause in the audio output. If you're using Maxi-Patch (AV or AO versions) you can just go into the Audio Settings window and change the I/O Vector Size to something else, then change it back. Doing that will bring the latency back down to something unnoticeable, and won't usually result in any audible artifact.



When using the U46DJ under OSX Tiger, you can take advantage of a new Tiger-only CoreAudio feature called "Aggregate Devices". This is a really amazing feature of Tiger which allows you to combine the I/O from multiple audio devices into a single virtual device called an "aggregate device". Any application requiring multi-channel audio I/O can then use this aggregate device as if it were truly a multi-channel audio I/O device. So in the case of the U46DJ, you combine its inputs with its outputs (which actually present themselves as separate devices to the OS) into one aggregate device. Inside Maxi-Patch or BinkyToy, you then select this aggregate device as your audio I/O device and the problem of latency accumulation no longer occurs! So, in my humble opinion, that alone is worth getting Tiger...

[tgerdin]

I see. Thanks for the thorough explanation. I haven't used BinkyToy enough to really getting annoyed by the gradual latency increase but it's true that it would be really worthwhile to get rid of that. Aggregated devices sound convienient as well, even though I don't really see how it would differ from how it works under 10.3.9. In Maxi-Patch I just select "CoreAudio:U46DJ" and I'm all set. In BinkyToy I need to manually configure inputs and outputs for the two groups but since you only do that once (as I mentioned, BinkyToy doesn't crash when U46DJ is permanently configured for it, unlike MaxiPatch). Well, I guess it would have upgraded sooner or later since 10.5 Leopard isn't due for another 18 months or so. I'll go look in the piggy bank and see what it has to offer.