Latency??!!

[ThreefoldChord]

Hey, I have never sat at the controls of any kind of pc recording software and have no Idea how to do it. so I have a stupid question. What is latency and how does it affect recording and monitoring? (head bowed in shame)

 

[bennychico11]

every gear has latency. latency is pretty much just the length of time it takes for a digital or electrical signal to get to another place. in the computer world usually it's the length of time for the CPU to process the signal and get it out to the speakers. and if if every peice of gear has latency, of course every gear has DIFFERENT latency. our job is to try and get the computer to reduce that latency as much as possible so it's not audible latency. pressing play on a DAW and seeing the timeline bar hit the waveform a second before you hear the actual wave is bad latency. especially bad in monitoring. this means the musician playing along is hearing the rest of the music late and in turn is playing late. but this won't be noticed until you go back and hear what he just recorded. NOT GOOD!

Most of the time drastic latency is caused by hardware buffers. so when recording you generally want the buffers to be low enough so you don't hear any pops, clicks, or latency. but when mixing you WANT the computer to think about it before you hear it so it's nice to increase the buffers to give it more processing time. of course, not too much that it starts annoying you how slow the computer is responding to your editing while playing. the trick is to manage your latency well enough that it doesn't become a problem. hope my babbling has helped you