Midi Latency

I am also suffering this problem on a couple of projects. Buffer size of 128, pretty light on the VSTi's no cores peaking, memory usage light, and I'm getting huge latency when playing synths. Played with MIDI buffer setting, no different. I ran a latency checker and it came back with no problems of issues. 

It's gotten to the point on one project where I can no longer record any parts live. Tried freezing synths, no joy. Going to try getting to the bottom of it tonight but right now it looks like just one of the various ways in which some of my projects become "corrupted" the longer I work on them. 

I'm just shooting from the hip here, I have no facts to base this on, but have you guys tried a different USB port?

I have a USB Wireless LAN thingy. Every once in a while I have to move it to a different USB port, let Windows discover it, then move it back to the original port. I do this because it starts to act flaky some times.

At the OP: Make sure you are using ASIO drivers. You said you were using a different sound card, maybe something got changed. ASIO usually is the best. Not always, but usually.

So it turns out that is IS the PDC. If I disable it with the PDC button, the latency completely disappears. The only problem is that I cannot work out which effect is causing the PDC to kick in to such an extent. I've been through everything, turning off every ProChannel module and FX chains one by one, and nothing makes a difference. I also hit the FX button to bypass all audio effects, and that doesn't make a difference either. The only thing that stops the latency is if I disable PDC. Any ideas of what it could be? I don't think I even use any effects that look ahead - the concrete limiter being a possibility, but turning off the two instances of that in the project doesn't make a difference either. 

Bummed 

I think I've isolated it to a track with Native Instrument's FM8 synth. Nothing in the ProChannel or FX Chain on the track is causing the delay (I've only got some LFO triggered wah-wah, the PC2A, OneKnob Louder and Sonnitus EQ) so it has to be the synth itself. 

I confirmed this by disabling PDC. All of the tracks remain in sync except this FM8 synth. It's weird. I can't for the life of me see anything in the patch itself which would be causing the delay. It has two FM8 effects active: the overdrive and the cabinet. And I'm also using FM8's arpeggiator. 

Maybe I'll take a look into FM8's settings in standalone to see if there's anything there which might be causing it. But for the moment I'm baffled, and still very much bummed 

OK the plot thickens and I have more clues, but understand what's going on even less. Here are the steps I'm taking to give me this clue (if anyone happens to have their Sherlock Holmes hat on)

1) I open the project, and without starting playback, I play a few notes on various soft synths. The latency is there. 
2) I then delete an instrument track that has an instance of Battery on it. There is then NO audible latency when I play soft synths. 
3) I start playback. Immediately the latency appears. 
4) I stop playback. The latency remains. 

In fact from the point at which I begin playback, the latency remains whether the project is playing or whether it's stopped, until I close the project and open it again, in which case steps 1-4 apply again. 

I really don't understand. Deleting this instance of Battery without playing anything back removed the latency, but as soon as playback starts the latency remains until I close the project and reload it. 

Any ideas? 

OP: first, determine if this is really an issue with MIDI latency or not. When you record a MIDI track, look at the MIDI notes in the PRV relative to the grid and see if they're all off by a consistent amount. If they're reasonably close and not consistently out of time, then it's not MIDI latency that's the problem.

[I find that when I use hardware synths, recording MIDI first and then recording audio, the audio may lag the MIDI notes slightly (but software synthesizers are always right on the money). I can easily mitigate that by manually inserting a MIDI note that's quantized to the grid and sliding the resulting audio over to exactly match up to it. At that point, I can be confident that any timing errors are the result of my own sloppy playing.]

But the problems described by both sharke and the OP are more likely monitoring problems caused by audio - not MIDI - latency. Audio latency has two primary factors: buffer size and the internal latency of individual plugins. (Plugin Delay Compensation (PDC) is not the culprit; it's job is to slow down the fast plugins so that the laggards can keep up.)

For ASIO and WDM, there is a predictable relationship between buffer size (including the hidden safety buffer mentioned by bvideo) and latency: it's going to be buffer size divided by the sample rate (latency can be reduced by reducing the buffer size or by . Therefore, if you still have unacceptable lag even at small buffer sizes, plugin latency is the more likely culprit.

Often, you cannot do anything about a plugin's internal latency. However, as noted above, you can temporarily disable PDC and tell SONAR to ignore plugin latency. This is the quickest way to determine if your latency is mainly due to plugin latency or to audio buffer size. 

Note that bypassing a plugin or muting a track does not affect PDC, which is still going to be calculated and compensated for as if the plugin were still active. The only way to to figure out which particular one's causing the greatest delay is to completely remove them one by one.

Plugins that cause the greatest latency are going to be the ones that have large internal buffers,  such as equalizers (especially linear-phase such as the LP-64) and reverbs (especially convolution types such as PerfectSpace). It's good practice to leave such plugins completely out of the chain until you've finished tracking.

But if you need a plugin to be active while tracking, it may be enough to turn of PDC. Sometimes the subsequent lack of synchronization between tracks won't be too much of a distraction. 

But if the lack of track synchronization causes problems, you can look at individual plugins, some of which have adjustable internal buffers. PerfectSpace, for example, has a buffer size setting (click on the Info button, then the "set latency" button and choose a smaller buffer - put it back to a larger one after you're done tracking). EQs often have buffer adjustments too. If you use Ozone, you can reduce the latency of its equalizer via the EQ Options dialog. If you use FabFilter Pro-Q, you can choose the "zero latency" (minimum phase) option. AFAIK, SONAR's bundled EQs do not offer this feature, although I can't speak to ProChannel as I am not a user.

Sonar needs to recompute latency compensation for various changes: adding or deleting effects, changing parameters on some effects that change their delay, etc. However, it's a little unpredictable when the recomputed PDC will kick in. For example, when I first open a project, there is no PDC latency on my external h/w synth routed through a Sonar audio track. But after hitting play, the latency kicks in on that audio track and stays kicked in until I do something that causes Sonar to rethink its PDC. This unpredictability might confound anyone who is trying to find the latent plugin.

swamptooth


another thing to note with win 8 is to run either in asio mode or wasapi.  never wdm, as it was discontinued with windows 7 and is just a wrapper for backwards compatability at this point.  posting a brief outline of what the project looks like - i.e. synths, number of audio tracks and fx plugins would be helpful as well.  

Not necessarily true.  In a post over at MotuNation, someone recommended switching to WDM/KS mode on the Motu device.  Just for kicks I tried and was able to drop my I/O buffer on the PCIe-424 from 512 to 64 (interestingly enough I was never able to do under ASIO without clicks and pops) on X2 under Windows 7x64.


This is relevant for my Motu PCIe-424 and may not necessarily apply for any other manufacturer's sound card and have no idea whether it is still applicable under Win8.  Here's the post for whomever is interested: http://www.motunation.com...c.php?f=14&t=49827


Best,

guitardood

swamptooth


another thing to note with win 8 is to run either in asio mode or wasapi.  never wdm, as it was discontinued with windows 7 and is just a wrapper for backwards compatability at this point.  posting a brief outline of what the project looks like - i.e. synths, number of audio tracks and fx plugins would be helpful as well.  

Not necessarily true.  In a post over at MotuNation, someone recommended switching to WDM/KS mode on the Motu device.  Just for kicks I tried and was able to drop my I/O buffer on the PCIe-424 from 512 to 64 (interestingly enough I was never able to do under ASIO without clicks and pops) on X2 under Windows 7x64.


This is relevant for my Motu PCIe-424 and may not necessarily apply for any other manufacturer's sound card and have no idea whether it is still applicable under Win8.  Here's the post for whomever is interested: http://www.motunation.com...c.php?f=14&t=49827


Best,

Seeing that the motunation post is 5 years old, I would lean to the assumption that motu has updated their drivers to work with wasapi in its newest form.  cake had kinks all over the place in wasapi mode with x1 and those seem to be gone in x2 except in 44.1khz projects for some reason.  wdm does not exist.  it's basically like asio4all.  using asio4all now is tricking software into thinking wdm is asio while wasapi is tricking asio4all into thinking it's wdm.  talk about a reacharound! lol.  


"[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"]The Windows Kernel Mixer (KMixer[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"]) is completely gone. There is no direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers; DirectSound and MME[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"] are emulated as Session instances. Since the whole point of DirectSound acceleration is to allow hardware to process unmixed audio content, DirectSound cannot be accelerated in this audio model, and DirectSound3D is not supported at all, which also breaks EAX extensions[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"].[4][font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"] APIs such as ASIO[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"] and OpenAL[font="sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px"] are not affected." from http://en.wikipedia.org/w...dio_stack_architecture

swamptooth

guitardood

swamptooth


another thing to note with win 8 is to run either in asio mode or wasapi.  never wdm, as it was discontinued with windows 7 and is just a wrapper for backwards compatability at this point.  posting a brief outline of what the project looks like - i.e. synths, number of audio tracks and fx plugins would be helpful as well.  

Not necessarily true.  In a post over at MotuNation, someone recommended switching to WDM/KS mode on the Motu device.  Just for kicks I tried and was able to drop my I/O buffer on the PCIe-424 from 512 to 64 (interestingly enough I was never able to do under ASIO without clicks and pops) on X2 under Windows 7x64.


This is relevant for my Motu PCIe-424 and may not necessarily apply for any other manufacturer's sound card and have no idea whether it is still applicable under Win8.  Here's the post for whomever is interested: http://www.motunation.com...c.php?f=14&t=49827


Best,

Seeing that the motunation post is 5 years old, I would lean to the assumption that motu has updated their drivers to work with wasapi in its newest form.  cake had kinks all over the place in wasapi mode with x1 and those seem to be gone in x2 except in 44.1khz projects for some reason.  wdm does not exist.  it's basically like asio4all.  using asio4all now is tricking software into thinking wdm is asio while wasapi is tricking asio4all into thinking it's wdm.  talk about a reacharound! lol.  

Actually, you might want to take a second look at the post.  The dude posting joined in 2007, but the post is dated April/2012.  I hear what you are saying and perhaps Microsoft is no longer supporting WDM but hadn't replaced with a wrapper yet in Win7.  I've switched off WaveRT support in the Motu control panel (latest 424 drivers from 9/2012, 3 2408mk3 & 1 24/io) and switch Sonar to WDM/KS and am getting lower latency (64 Samples) than I've ever gotten running BFD2 (Full 32-piece Custom Kit) & Machfive (4 active instruments) with no pops/clicks and negligible delay from the midi keyboard triggering them.  Go figure.


Best,