Are these acceptable and workable latency numbers.....

[ClintB]

I'm getting into recording vocals and the issue of latency is a new subject for me. Basically I'm getting my AAA kicked with it. LOL
I'm working on lowering my buffer size. I was at 512 the default setting. the delay was unbearable. I would speak into the mic and it would take a second to hear it in my phones. Which felt like forever!!!
I lowered the buffer to 128. since then it's a lot better. my questions are is this what you have to do if your going to record in a daw format and is 128 a good workable number to record vocals at?
i attached a picture of my preferences where you can see my buffer number and the latency ms associated with it.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3ts165emn1h4 ... M.png?dl=0

[Stromkraft]

i attached a picture of my preferences

A not so enlightening picture I'm afraid. I don't even see what audio interface you have when I zoom (which meant I had to download the picture as the stupid web site can't zoom pictures).

Use Cmd-Shift-4 and then space bar before you click on the dialog next time. This will give just the dialog instead of your whole irrelevant desktop. That or/and learn to crop.

So which audio interface? When I record drums I use a 32 to 128 samples buffer which gives me maybe 4-5ms to 7-8 ms of latency.

Even better I can give make a specific submix in the audio interface for the vocalist with room reverb and delay, that I don't record and has zero latency. If I use this I can use a 512 samples buffer. The audio going out then has 13ms of latency and that will affect the timing somewhat of the vocalist, but this has seldom been a problem for me. Occasionally I've had to slide the recording afterwards, but that's more common for drums.

[ClintB]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3ts165emn1h4 ... M.png?dl=0

I crop this. hopefully it's better. I have a saffire pro24 by the way.

[yur2die4]

Are you using any heavy vsts at the same time?

Do you have the same latency when you open an empty set?

[ClintB]

I just did a A/B comparison. I did it with an empty set and it sounds pretty good. I then added 10 midi tracks and put an eq plugin on all of them to see how it would respond if I started adding vst's to the set and it's still sounding ok.

I'm not sure why now its acting ok but now it's like i could record someone and actually feel confident that the session will go smooth. I need to be able to have my own headphone mix so the singer can monitor her vocals but not have the latency be so bad they cant sing along with the backing tracks.

The one thing i need to figure out is how to do direct monitoring on the headphone bus that's feeding my vocalist. I have direct monitoring working perfectly if it's just me singing and the mix is going to the master out but if im using a headphone bus to give my singer her own mix, i can't seem to do direct monitoring. So, my singer is forced to monitor through Ableton instead of monitoring the signal coming straight from my interface with zero latency.

Any advice....

[yur2die4]

What reverb are you using? In the bottom of the Live screen, when you hover your mouse over a device or vst it will show you the latency that the plug in will add.

[Angstrom]

you need to read this article about improving latency when monitoring armed tracks.

READ
https://www.ableton.com/en/help/article ... onitoring/

tl;dr - lots of plugins in your set will put latency on everything, but there is an option to allow armed and monitored tracks to take the quickest route and ignore the latency incurred by all the other tracks.

---
SIDENOTES
to think about how much latency 512 samples actually is.
at 44.1kHz sample rate 1second / 44100 samples,
so each sample is taken every 0.0000226... of a second
512 of those samples equates to 0.0116... of a second. Also known as "about twelve milliseconds"

other processes in your computer add some more latency to that, but it usually works out around 14 ms , which is Okayish . Try setting a 14ms delay in an Ableton effect like SimpleDelay to familiarise yourself with the actual length of that sort of delay.

[H20nly]

^ Nice. I've never noticed/used that feature... Never had to, but still pretty cool.

*bookmark* for further investigation

[alpertt]

Another solution maybe a 2 track (1 for all channels premix, 1 for live record) clean project and make buffer as low as possible.

For better control, you can make 4-5 tracks (bass,drums,melodies separate) and still with no plugins..

I used to do this with my old G4 and protools 6, very effective.
Little bit more job, of course.