All About Latency, Pt. 3

Alright, so you’ve tried adjusting your input and output buffers in your DAW, as outlined in part 2 of this series, but you still can’t get your latency low enough to be useable during recording, without also introducing digital distortion into your recordings.

This can happen if you’re using a very slow or old computer, with not a lot of RAM. So we need some solutions to manage computing resources more efficiently.

Managing computing resources to help with audio latency issues

1) try freeing up additional computing resources by using less effects in your track. Reverbs in particular tend to be very computation intensive.

2) try recording at a lower sample rate (16 bit 44.1 kHz is just fine for demos, and any rough stuff you’re planning to re-record). Recording at high sample rates (96 kHz, for example), on an old and slow computer, can easily cause resource issues.

3) Use a faster computer with at least 16 GB of RAM, if possible. Solid state hard drives will work much better than spinning disks.

4) try enabling low latency mode in your DAW, if that’s an option you’ve got.

Cons: you may not hear certain effects you’ve added while recording in low latency mode. When you’re just playing back audio and not actively recording a track, these effects should reappear. Low latency mode disables certain plugins that take up large amounts of resources, but only while active recording is in progress. Reverbs will often get disabled when using this mode.

More solutions on managing latency are coming up as we continue this series!