Using Hardware - Calculating Latency etc.

Hi guys, I've scoured the forums and the manual for literally hours yesterday trying to get this to work properly.
I've recently got some hardware and wanted to start using it.
I recently got a Drawmer DL221 (which sounds awesome on a drum bus btw!) and am using it on drums for example.
I route all the drum tracks out into the DL221 and re-record it to a new track. How do I calculate the latency so phase etc is in line?

The second option I tried is using the external insert function so that it has built in latency compensation but how do I 'record' that track? The manual alludes to the freeze function but I can not get it working.

Any ideas on either approach? Or is there a third / better approach?

Thanks guys.

Rob[atSound-Rehab]

Adji
I recently got a Drawmer DL221 (which sounds awesome on a drum bus btw!) and am using it on drums for example.
I route all the drum tracks out into the DL221 and re-record it to a new track. How do I calculate the latency so phase etc is in line?

 
I'd use the practical route i.e. send out a single sharp transient (e.g. snare hit or click), record it, zoom in and measure the difference in samples from the difference in recordings (e.g. split both at peak of transient and read length in samples from inspector)
 

Adji
The second option I tried is using the external insert function so that it has built in latency compensation but how do I 'record' that track? The manual alludes to the freeze function but I can not get it working.

route bus to aux track

Thanks man, both great ideas, I will try both.

With the sample measurement I then just manually move the new track back in time by the number of samples required?

Adji
 
Thanks man, both great ideas, I will try both.

With the sample measurement I then just manually move the new track back in time by the number of samples required?

... or use ChannelTools which allows you to delay the entire track by exactly x samples as previously determined

There was a free latency testing tool that worked well under Win7 and earlier but changes in the Win8 kernel broke it.

Right now the best way to test what latency is seems to be the audio track-interface-audio track method suggested above. Which is pretty much what the free tool did anyway.

As for matching phase with the source track, phase is affected by more than just any post-process latency delay on any looped back track. The two tracks can be in perfect time sync but still have phasing issues unless the hardware doesn't cause a phase shift in the audio as it processes it.

Parallel compression done by mixing two tracks, one compressed the other not, rather than one track and a compressor with built-in parallel processing can be a bit tricky at times because of this. Sometimes it's better to align phase between the tracks so they don't null each other out and forgo sample-accurate time alignment.

Edited to add-
By the way, setting a permanent offset for external hardware effects in Sonar is fine unless you use more than one digital processor or a mix of analogue and digital hardware processors, because different digital devices are very likely to have different processing times, which makes a "one setting for all purposes" solution less than ideal.

Thanks for all the tips guys, will get to try it out this week.

Anderton
Why not use the external insert plug-in? It pings for delays and compensates. 

Thanks man. This was discussed earlier as something I already do but I was needing to learn how to 'record' that external insert as the outputs on my interface are very limited. Cheers.