I use my laptop to play with music software. Most professional audio devices use special types of audio drivers (ASIO) that allows configuring the audio buffer size. The smaller the buffer, less latency you will have from activating some control and hear the results.

However reducing the buffer size to something that is too low, typically causes audio drop-outs due to starvation of the audio driver.

Another cause for drop-outs is that other apps/drivers are keeping high priority threads for too long.

Because of that, if I'm going to do a performance, I created a bunch of scripts to disable as many devices and services that I can, including network access, bluetooth, and so on.

I'd love to have my scripts replaced by a nice UI from you guys. I know lots of other musicians that would appreciate that as well.

One tool that I use to tune my system is this one: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

It would be nice to have something similar but that helps to identify the causes of the latency spikes.

Thanks,
Marcelo