Latency Question

With Battery 3, it makes a difference to freeze the soft-synth while tracking the other instruments. But I seem to need to nudge the tracks in place regardless, so this only affects how much I need to nudge them.

I tend to print them to audio. Then I bypass the synth and archive the synth track.

Some time back I recorded with synths running and the audio was off a bit....I need to nudge it...

The more synths and FX the more the latency issue might be a problem..... so by bouncing to audio, even if it's a scratch timing track, you can eliminate that latency with the synths.....

My synths and FX have become bigger resource hogs as I moved into the better ones..... so I had to adapt the bounce to track method of working. Running a couple of synths using samples and a big FX put me into the pops and clicks range on processor usage.....



I have a new DAW arriving soon and that might be a past issue with the new box.

I have found that simply bypassing the FX bin reduces the synth load on the processor too.  A temporary and fast solution to processor overload.

I have used the freeze synth function and it works fine.

I also bounce to track and archive the synth.....

It all depends on what strikes your fancy at the moment...since they all work fine.

"Soft synths have that advantage over hardware synths - no latency compensation needed."

Anything that is triggered/transformed/processed creates latency.... even a soft synth. Just because we now can tweak the settings to lower it so you can't really hear it (say while playing or recording a track while using it-Human ear can't hear it separately(We can hear the phasing but not separation) below 25ms) there is always latency. The best and fastest processors in the world (not your home computer) still have latency, even if it is a quad core with bridge technology to reduce bottle necking (Until the bridge technology having two or more processors was almost pointless as they shared the same data bus and created more latency)... plus the hard drives always have latency as well (4-5ms)... so nothing is latency free and everything you work on will have to have some sort of compensation for this, either by sliding your recorded track, or other.

In my opinion and in my own work... I bounce the MIDI drums to at least one track (More if you want to separate the cymbals from the kick from the toms, etc so you can process them separately) and then record.

The biggest issues I have with latency(even with the very small amount we have been able to achieve these days) is lining up the kick with the bass.. because of the large waveforms a few milliseconds can begin to have phase problems (this result is a loss in frequency volume) and I have to line each beat up by hand to get that "in your stomach" down beat.

However I am extremely picky with phase and timing in my work (especially my main job-my personal tracks are more of a hobby and I don't get so deep knowing I will eventually have someone else play it to record an album)

Jason,
 
He was talking about latency compensation for outboard effects & synths.