I was recently making a song where I needed to drastically cut the volume of the song during a short time frame (one measure, I think) and then immediately bring it back up to it's original volume. I did this by attaching a Utility plug to the master track with about a -4dB setting and setting up automation such that it turned on immediately when the measure started and turned off right afterward.
I had significant latency - I set my audio interface to 2048 samples and was also using several Nebula 3 reverb plugins on a few tracks, including the master (Nebula 3 Reverb has about 1/3 second of latency). I thought that everything was being compensated for. However, there was an error that I noticed:
Because of the latency, the playback cursor/bar that runs the length of the screen and shows the position being played was reaching certain segments of the song before I heard them. This was expected. When the cursor reached the position of the low-volume measure, the Utility gain-lowering plugin kicked on, both visually (the "on/off" switch lit up) and aurally (the volume was reduced). However, the audio was still delayed. Thus, a segment of the song before the target measure was reduced in volume, not the target measure. In other words, even though the automation data was drawn in such that the target measure would have lowered volume, instead the volume was lowered when the cursor reached that measure and not when playback reached that measure about half of a second later (due to latency).
Even when I moved the Utility plugin to another, non-master track, and even when I exported the audio to a .wav file, the error still remained. How can I fix this problem such that I don't have to redraw the automation data to compensate for the latency?
Thank you,
Khaos