All About Latency, Pt. 5

One of the last troubleshooting tips for this series on latency: make sure “plugin delay compensation” is enabled in your DAW.

This is usually a feature that is enabled by default in most modern DAWs. But, if it’s been turned off and you’re using a lot of effects, this could be adding to your latency problems.

What is Plugin Delay Compensation?

Every audio effect you add to a track, whether it’s an EQ or a compressor or a reverb, adds a small amount of computer processing time to the signal, and thus additional latency into your recording system.

Plugin delay compensation adjusts for this by automatically tracking how much delay each individual plugin is using on each track, and adjusts the timing of audio playback in the background so that everything stays in sync. This is done so transparently as to be unnoticeable to you, most of the time.

It would not be unusual for you to not know this feature even exists in your DAW, because even if you’re using a ton of digital plugins, your total adjusted latency for an entire song might be under 10 ms. That’s not something you’re going to hear as a noticeable delay when you hit that spacebar to play back your music.

So, if this feature is turned off, and you’ve got a lot of computationally intensive effects in use, you could be getting into some latency playback issues inside your DAW that would be tricky to troubleshoot.

Keep this feature on at all times! There’s no advantage to turning it off, and plenty to be gained by using this tool. If you want to check your settings to confirm plugin delay compensation is on, you’ll need to dig into your DAW audio settings, and there will likely be a checkbox for this feature. The location will differ depending on which DAW you’re using.

Next in this series, we’ll summarize everything we’ve learned about latency! You can reference the whole series of latency articles right here.