How do I get lower latency audio and better utilize my cpu?

[CosmicWanderer]

I may not be the first one to ask this question, but the "Is this already being discussed?" field didn't give me anything about this. I have been dabbling lately with music production and I am noticing a delay between when I press a key on a midi keyboard and when audio plays. I would like to minimize that delay as much as possible, but I also want to use my system to stay just as good for other things. I am pretty new to the technical side of audio, I just know the very basics.

I found a few complicated online tutorials saying to install a different kernel, but I don't really want a dedicated audio system. I do a lot of other things with my computer and I don't want to sacrifice functionality in those other areas.

I found one helpful guide that told me how to decrease the buffer size, which I set to 256. It was great for a bit, but then my cpu, which has 16 cores, was unable to keep up when I played three of four tracks. I personally found a buffer size of 256 to be acceptable, and I don't know if it's actually insane and super hard on my cpu, but I thought it should be a little better than that with a higher end cpu.

I also added myself to the pipewire group, which had this file in /etc/security/limits.d

# This file was installed by PipeWire project for its libpipewire-module-rt.so

# It is up to the distribution/user to create the @pipewire group and to add the
# relevant users to the group.
#
# PipeWire will fall back to the RTKit DBus service when the user is not able to
# acquire RT priorities with rlimits.
#
# If the group is not automatically created, the match rule will never be true
# and this file will have no effect.
#
@pipewire   - rtprio  70
@pipewire   - nice    -19
@pipewire   - memlock 4194304

I use fedora 44 with 100% pipewire, is jack better? My cpu is an intel 13700k and I have 32gb of ddr5 ram.