What's with the newer plugins having all this latency? Why do they need to have so much latency if the CPU is easily able to process them in real time? It's realy nice to have no lag between when you change a setting and when you hear the change. Plugin latency is messing all that up. There must be a better way.
Latency Plugins
- Thread starter bdemenil
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dgatwood
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bdemenil said:
A lot of effects have to process a fairly large buffer of data at one time. For example, anything doing a time domain to frequency domain transform will inherently require a certain buffer size in order to get the desired level of precision in terms of the width of the frequency buckets.
A longer processing buffer automatically means you have to have longer latency. That said, I've never seen a plugin that didn't respond fairly promptly to changes in its controls. If latency is more than a quarter second or so, that sounds like your CPU is just too taxed to pass the control changes on to the plug-in.
Remember that the plug-in's GUI doesn't control the plug-in, at least in VST. The plug-in's GUI sends messages to the audio app, which in turn, sends messages to the plug-in's processing engine. Under high load, those pipes can get clogged.
yeah 250ms lag is not the end of the world, but it is noticable.
And you're right, where the lag is more noticable sometimes is when I'm dragging around EQ settings on the GUI - sometimes there's a little more lag - probably due to a GUI issue - thanks for pointing that out.
And your answer makes sense - I was thinking of the buffers as just something to smooth variability - like hard drive buffers - and i guess sound card buffers- but it makes sense if the plugins need to operate on chunks of data. But seems like with digital outboard gear they manage to do these things almost latency free - so it must be possible.
And you're right, where the lag is more noticable sometimes is when I'm dragging around EQ settings on the GUI - sometimes there's a little more lag - probably due to a GUI issue - thanks for pointing that out.
And your answer makes sense - I was thinking of the buffers as just something to smooth variability - like hard drive buffers - and i guess sound card buffers- but it makes sense if the plugins need to operate on chunks of data. But seems like with digital outboard gear they manage to do these things almost latency free - so it must be possible.
Lots of plugins have more than 20ms latency: most UADs, waves renaissance, sonalksis, and many more. And when you start chaining them together it does add up. Reverbs are the worst of course.
Hardware units that do all the same things typically have latencies under 1ms. I think in theory there's no reason why software plugins shouldn't be able to have latencies matching their hardware counterparts.
Hardware units that do all the same things typically have latencies under 1ms. I think in theory there's no reason why software plugins shouldn't be able to have latencies matching their hardware counterparts.
dgatwood
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bdemenil said:
By UADs, I assume you mean external hardware. That's a different issue entirely.
I hadn't even thought about multiband compressors. Depending on the technique used for the filter banks, they can qualify as "beefy stuff". I didn't feel the need to give an exhaustive list. The point is that 250 ms for a single plug-in would be... extremely unusual.
Note that when I consider latency, I am not including look-ahead. That only affects latency for live use. For all other cases, the DAW should stay far enough ahead at filling the buffer that it is a non-issue.