Old 03-09-2016, 07:26 PM   #1
Leyf
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Default Help Reducing Latency?

Hey everybody.

I'm very new to the audio production/recording scene and am starting to become much more serious with my hobby. I am have a rather difficult timing getting all of my devices to cooperate. I'm experiencing 21-33ms according to Reaper (it says this in the top right corner of Reaper).

Heres my set up:

-Surface Pro 3 laptop
-j5 Create powered USB hub
(the USB hub is plugged into my laptops only USB port)

In the Powered USB hub:
-Scarlet Focusrite 2i4
-KORG USB Mini22key

And finally, plugged into the Scarlet, are 2 studio monitors and one Blue Yeti Pro mic.

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Ultimately I tried a lot of playing around with options, and doing some intense Googling. There is a lot of information out there about latency, but I am overwhelmed and have no direction. I would really appreciate if somebody could help me reduce this lag so I can properly record.

Thank you very much!
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Old 03-09-2016, 07:50 PM   #2
bluzkat
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Did you check out the Reaper videos? Especially the section "Setting Up Shop", see here:

http://www.cockos.com/reaper/videos.php.

Also there is the Reaper User Guide, you can download here:

http://www.cockos.com/reaper/userguide.php.

Welcome to Reaperville!!



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Old 03-10-2016, 01:53 AM   #3
ivansc
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In prefs/options/audio is your device showing up as the focusrite ASIO device?
Once you have that showing, you should be able to open the ASIO box which accesses the ASIO device settings from Focusrite themselves.
If memory serves, the buffer setting is set in m.secs rather than buffer size, so set it as low as you can get away with without any pops crackles etc.
It is usually a case of trial and error to get the best compromise between audio quality and low latency.

apologies if you already did this.

Oh and resplendence.com have a good latency checker - run it with reaper up and running and it will
a) tell you if your system is up to recording multitrack audio and
b) point up any issues you DO have.
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Old 03-10-2016, 03:11 AM   #4
CyberAP
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Try plugging in your sound interface directly into usb port bypassing usb hub. If that changes latency USB is your bottleneck.
Second thing to check is ASIO. Check that you're using Focusrite latest ASIO driver and it's selected in Reaper audio device preferences, also set buffer size to 256 samples. If that didn't help try to install ASIO4ALL and use it instead, which may improve latency time.
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Old 03-10-2016, 03:24 PM   #5
Leyf
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Thanks guys, these suggestions helped a little bit. What latency should I be aiming for?
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Old 03-10-2016, 03:56 PM   #6
DVDdoug
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Quote:
What latency should I be aiming for?
Low enough that you can't hear it, or low enough that it doesn't bother you...

21mS might be OK. Sound travels through the air at about 1 foot per millisecond so that's like having the speaker about 21 feet (about 6.5M) from you. That's usually a tolerable delay. 33mS might be pushing it. 5-10mS should be acceptable in any situation. 50mS very noticeable and usually intolerable. (Unless you are a pipe-organist and you're used to those kind of delays... )

IMO - The best solution is to get an interface with zero-latency hardware monitoring. When the monitoring path doesn't go through the computer you can use a nice big buffer without worrying about latency at all...

The Scarlett may have zero-latency monitoring. The Yeti has a headphone jack with zero-latency monitoring, but I don't know if it works in the analog mode (and if you are using the Yeti with the Scarlett I assume you are using it as an analog mic).
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Old 03-10-2016, 10:47 PM   #7
mschnell
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Leyf View Post
Thanks guys, these suggestions helped a little bit. What latency should I be aiming for?
That depends on he task you are working on.

I use Reaper for live playing with keyboard and VST instruments. Here only a few milliseconds are acceptable and of course no crackles that might appear when latency is set too low for the available processing power. So I use a high power machine to be able to set latency rather low. (Beware the plugins. e.g. ReaVerb can be set to "No Latency" to not "in any case" avoiding crackles. Otherwise it can introduce a second latency to the complete system).

For a system simply doing recording (no realtime monitoring), I set latency very high (several 100 milliseconds), allowing for a low power PC to stream some 20 tracks to the network server, guaranteed without any glitches.

For offline mixing (I use a third machine for this) a decent latency is acceptable, but you can set latency so low that when monitoring some crackles are to be heard (and reaper shows performance problems in red), as when rendering, any glitches are avoided automatically by reaper, anyway.

When using a single machine, you can use different ini files to start Reaper to set the latency (and other peformance parameters) according to the task

-Michael
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