UAD with Live - Latency question ...

Parametex · Post by **Parametex** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:13 am

Do UAD cards introduce latency to the audio path (like some plugins do) when used in live?

ekwipt · Post by **ekwipt** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:21 am

Yes. All souncards have some sort of latency. On the right setup it won't be noticable

mr.adl · Post by **mr.adl** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:29 am

It does but gets compensated by Live, except for the Precision Multiband Kompressor and i think the Precision EQ which work with very high samplerates.

I use 4 UAD cards and recognize only latency when use the Multiband (don´t own the EQ).

No problems at all with UAD and Live

(at least for me running Win XP SP 3 on DuoCore2)

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:03 pm

The UAD's latency is twice your audio buffer, the audio travels to the DSP card, and then back. It's supposed to get worse if you use multiple UAD plugs in series.

With Live's PDC all latency is compensated, so for mixing it's fine.
It's not so good for recording vocals/live instruments, but:

You could bounce a guide track to audio, then for the recording session run the smallest buffer size at double the sample rate (which again halves the latency) to record the vocalist/live performer, and get acceptable latency.

The plugins sound really great by the way.

Parametex · Post by **Parametex** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:53 pm

Thx for the replys guys,

So while mixing Live compensates for the introduced latency 100% right?

Thas cool coz that's what I was hoping on using it.

A huge problem for me in Live is that in Live doesn't implicate (3rd party) pluging that introduce latency on the audio path. So when mixing I use tons of plugins and I'm constantly left paranoid if the tracks are falling behind in time ... You know what I'm talking about heavy plugin users I'm sure ...

P.

dcease · Post by **dcease** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:57 pm

uad and live work great together. freeze is a good way to work around the processing limit. nothing to be paranoid about. enjoy your uad card, i just picked up another

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:58 pm

+1, got 2 cards here. No trouble at all, its just amazing.

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 9:16 pm

You wouldn't want them on while tracking, but on mixdown it's no problem. This is true of most plugins, track it raw then add your sparkles and processing after on mixdown (no need for 32 sample low latency for that job).

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 11:57 pm

If you want to record for example vocals you can bounce a guide track for the singer to sing to, so all Live has to do CPU wise is play one stereo file.

Then you can set the buffer to 64 samples no problem, and you could also record at double the normal sample rate wich will again halve the latency.
(And then afterwards resample them with a freebie like r8brain if you don't want big files)

I also got 2 cards.

Mike Goodwin · Post by **Mike Goodwin** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 1:04 am

Glad to hear you guys are not having problems with uad cards at this point. When I was trying to work with them and live 6 it was a constant pain in the ass. So bad I sold the cards even though I love the software.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:53 pm

Mine would always give me little glitches even with very little going on but i stuck with it and tweeked everything I could think of/find on the Internet, until I one day found the tweak that got it good.

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 11:43 am

UAD cards are sensitive to certain MOBO/chipset configurations on PC and just will plain glitch out if you happen to have a combo that doesn't work well for UAD (or which they haven't coded properly or optimized). Digidesign are like this, I remember them a while ago posting lists of non supported mobos and saying 'protools le will not be supported if you have an xyz motherboard or abc chipset).

Even the latest quad core Mac towers cannot support UAD at present, although the MacbookPro dual cores work tremendous with it from what I've heard.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 1:15 pm

My Mobo is actually one of the recommended chipsets.
My issue was i have an M-audio delta soundcard and then you need to set the UAD's PCI latency at 64 and everything else BELOW that.

The normal tweak is audio card largest nubmer (highest priority) but for M-Audio delta and USB (=non bus mastering DMA) it's the other way round.

Anyway, that was the master tweak for me.

andrewj · Post by **andrewj** » Mon Jan 18, 2016 10:03 am

Just workflowwise I would love to know if you would bounce and take this bounce into a new session, recording all vocals there and then go back, or would you prefer to mute all other tracks, load the bounced file into the current session and delete it after you have recorded your audio?

jlgrimes · Post by **jlgrimes** » Mon Jan 18, 2016 7:41 pm

Parametex wrote:Do UAD cards introduce latency to the audio path (like some plugins do) when used in live?

Yes/No.

Bottom line is many plug-ins introduce some form of latency. The UAD cards will be no exception especially since they are high quality emulations of hardware a lot of them will employ some form of oversampling to better model the hardware (even some of Live's built-in plugins increase latency). This is a problem not just with UAD but plug-ins in general. Many even use some type of lookahead processing (e.g. a lot of pitch shifting and digital compressor plug-ins). Some plug-ins can even have more latency than UAD plug-ins (cough. cough. Izotope).

But when mixing all of this will be compensated for in Live using its buffers. There have been some cases where Live didn't compensate correctly but that is a bug (either on Ableton's part or the plug-in manufacturer). As a UAD owner (Apollo), I will say they play nicely with Ableton (on Mac's).

That said in you are considering the Apollo take note that to record with the UAD effects (or live realtime monitoring via effects), it does require more latency than a normal interface would. About the lowest latency I get on an Apollo Thunderbolt is about 10 ms (a little less). I would think a similar audio interface would probably have a roundtrip latency that is lower.

That said even with the increased latency the audio doesn't sound late or anything and I play soft synths a lot and I am very sensitive to latency. I would feel very comfortable using the Apollo in a live setting.

UAD with Live - Latency question ...

UAD with Live - Latency question ...

Re: UAD with Live - Latency question ...

Re: UAD with Live - Latency question ...