PDC - How to assess plugin latency ?

Hi folks,
 
Found myself in what must be a familiar situation - building a project at the tracking stage and assembling a 'rough' mix to track to with simple effects (comps, reverbs etc...). Now the problem is that I am extremely sensitive to plugins that add significant latency so I'm wanting to set up a 'tracking' set of plugins for use on live inputs / tracks that I can use without pushing the latency to uncomfortable limits.
 
How do I find out the effective latency of a plugin within Sonar ? Comfortable with readings in ms. or samples. My PSP Audio plugins are much loved at the moment as they all report latency in their UI. Alas my IK and Waves plugs are more secretive about their inner workings. Sure I could skim read all of my plugin manuals but I guess this would be a tedious task and possibly prone to errors when certain features can extend latency (upsampling etc...). I'd appreciate a live reading if you see my meaning. No signs of this info in the plugin manager.
 
Need your wisdom my fellow musicake bakers!

 I'm wanting to set up a 'tracking' set of plugins for use on live inputs / tracks

 
You do realise that whatever plugins you use during tracking, they will not be applied to your tracks?

Sanderxpander
Waves publishes this in their manuals. Speaking very generally, compressors/limiters with look-ahead or automatic adaptive parameters (especially so called "transient designers"), linear phase EQs, and impulse based reverbs add significant latency.

You only have to go to website for a plugin for Waves stuff.
Tech Specs tab below - and then Latency tab.
 
Even for a bundle product you get a full list and sample rate.

 
Look at Gold bundle:
http://www.waves.com/bundles/gold
 
 I also vote for having a column somewhere for this.

Kylotan

Bristol_Jonesey
You do realise that whatever plugins you use during tracking, they will not be applied to your tracks?

They will be applied to what you hear. eg. If you're recording into a guitar amp sim, you're listening to the effect of the plugin.

but not committed/applied to the recorded wav

pwalpwal

Kylotan

Bristol_Jonesey
You do realise that whatever plugins you use during tracking, they will not be applied to your tracks?

They will be applied to what you hear. eg. If you're recording into a guitar amp sim, you're listening to the effect of the plugin.

but not committed/applied to the recorded wav

I'm pretty sure the OP knows this, and was just saying that he wants to identify which plugins he can use with the confidence that he won't encounter an latency problems while input monitoring his live performance during recording.

One trick is to add some empty bars at the start of your project, so it has time catch up with all your system.  It displays the roundtrip latency, under (P)references > Audio Driver.

SilentMind
Methinks a feature request for 'live' PDC readings within Sonar would be prudent at this point.

 
Yes, that would be a great feature in SONAR. In REAPER, instead of "live" it is referred to as "dynamic" PDC. Not only are the plug-in delay latency values view-able and updated on the fly during playback, but this dynamic aspect allows uninterrupted project playback as you add sample delay inducing plug-ins on the fly. In SONAR, this can cause a slight gap (glitch) in playback as SONAR resets it's PDC each time you add/delete a plug-in that has a sample delay. Although to Cakewalks credit, the latest versions of SONAR have improved so this gap/glitch is much less noticeable than it was years ago.
 
Cheers,
 
Billy Buck
 

I know this is an older thread, but in case the OP missed my other thread, here is how you can now determine the latency that each plugin introduces.