[LAU] MIDI jitter - Was: outfitting a computer for songwriting in linux?

Jeremy, we shouldn't discuss this in the original thread. There are latency test measurements in the mailing list archive. PCI and PCIe cards show better results, IOW less MIDI jitter. There are also explanations why USB suffers from more jitter. The point of difference is, if the MIDI jitter is audible. It is! The measurements might not provide correct results. To measure a system by itself is a bad test and to measure a MIDI loop in addition is tricky. Jakob (living in Augsburg) from a Linux mailing list (perhaps LAU or LAD) years ago send me a board to loop through MIDI and that provides an audio output, to record the MIDI signal to an audio track. I never had time and interest to continued my MIDI jitter tests, so I still didn't use it. I guess this would be a better test, then the latency test. Howsoever, it's better to use PCI or PCIe, IIRC some USB interfaces even fail(ed) the latency test that measures a MIDI loop. The USB interface I own doesn't fail the test, but I'm anyway not satisfied and use PCI and PCIe MIDI only. That's it, I can't provide more information and I'm not willing to search the mailing lists archives. Regards, Ralf