Be careful with resource-heavy plugins while tracking

[Steenamaroo]

I’m not sure I understand - what do you mean tracking & monitoring through a plugin? I put a series of plugins on a vocal track - EQ -Tube EQ - Exciter - 2 Compressors , DeEsser etc.. Then I buss to a Compressor track and a Reverb Track - I am using Logic Pro - there is no noticeable latency in my setup - I also have Drums with various Plugins, Guitars, Bass,Synths etc... with Various plugins (Like Helix Native) etc…they all run with no noticeable latency - I have my I/O buffer size set to 64 Samples -

Unless I’m mistaken this is more resource heavy than just a UA Preamp and LA2A - so maybe there is something mixed up in your system?

There's two different scenarios. One is a problem and the other shouldn't be.
Say your mix has plugins which introduce latency so what you hear, and perform to when doing overdubs, is late.
This shouldn't be an issue. Many DAWs compensate for this.
They know the backing you're hearing was 1024 late, so they delay that vocal by the same amount to make things right in the mix.

If there are tracks in your mix with plugin delay of 1000, 600, and 200 ms,
the daw should delay those by 0,400,800, so everything's late but correct.

The problem comes, for example, if there's some plugin on your vocal track introducing a half second latency and you need to hear your self while you record.
That's where you're going to need to disable the offending effects, or set up a monitoring bus for your input that has these-will-do low latency plugins, just for nice monitoring,
or use real-time monitoring and accept that what you hear will be dry whilst recording.

 

[TalismanRich]

I've read some things about Win12, but I suspect that the majority of it is pure speculation. AI integration/Copilot, local account or MS account, neural processing unit requirement, 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). That's all been mentioned. Latest I have read is 2027 release. Some speculated late 2026 but that looks a bit ambitious.

Requiring an NPU will disqualify ALL Intel processors that aren't Ultra or AMD Ryzen AI or AI Pro. That's a LOT of computers, including stuff that is currently for sale.

Oh dear! That does not sound good!

Dave.

I was reading some additional info on Win12. It says that 12th Gen Intel processors without NPU should run but it will lack some abilities for tasks that would need the NPU. I guess it's a bit like the old days when you could get a math coprocessor. It would speed up your spreadsheet computations, but you could still run it without one, just slower. Or a game that can do ray tracing might still run but the video wouldn't be as good.

Things like photo and video editing can be optimized for an NPU, but you'll still be able to do basic operations and functionality like you would have with Win 11 if the NPU isn't present. Things like Microsoft 365 will want to have Copilot with the NPU to run efficiently. Voice recognition is another area where NPU is wanted. If video editing is helped, maybe audio processing in DAWs could be enhanced as well. Obviously that means some rewriting by the DAW authors. It might be a place where plug-ins could be processed in the NPU while the CPU takes care of the task of handling the incoming/outgoing audio stream. This could fix some of the latency issues noted above.

Other requirements are looking like minimum 8GB but better 16GB, SSD only (not a big issue these days), TMP2.0 and SecureBoot as with WIn 11, and DirectX 12.