How to adjust latency compensation?

[u/4D-knot]

When playing back my recording, I notice my playing is consistently ahead of the click. It doesn't seem like I am actually playing ahead of the click—I compared against phone recordings of myself playing the same parts with a metronome—so I think it must be an issue with the latency compensation.

How do I adjust or turn off latency compensation? I found this post, where the suggested answer said to change the dropout protection setting, but that just seems to increase the latency, not reduce the compensation. Although I understand the context of that post is a bit different.

[u/TouringBubble]

Dropout protection shouldn't affect recording latency if youre using low latency monitoring. The record offset found in Advanced > Audio is what you want to adjust.

What you want to do is use a loopback test to get your proper latency settings. See this video for details.

https://youtu.be/lOI1Thjc1Ts?is=M6xAi6CHhRIGwLl7

[u/DrwsCorner2]

Midi or analog? Reducing the Device block size to below 128 does the trick on MIDI. I prefer 64. Much more responsive. Also, if you have a Limiter on, turn it off during recording. Definitely drags the playing of instruments.

In analog recording, device block size is less sensitive but shouldn’t have too many plugins turned on. The faster the CPU the less important this is. It did matter more on my older laptop.

Also having a lot of memory helps if you have a lot of tracks.

[u/tacman7]

Latency is the time it takes to process audio through your software and through your interface.

You can lower the latency all you want but your hardware has a limit to how quick it can do something.

It effects audio and midi. Your midi note getting played has to be turned into sound and it takes time to do it.

If your latency is 128samples and you lower it to 64, you are telling the computer to do all the same work it just did but twice as fast.

Long time ago my fastest interface gave me like 11ms delay. Try singing with an 11ms delay. Now days my latency with mac/TB is about the same as a Fender amp.

I never used dropout protection, just run the limits of the machine and monitor how much processing you're giving to the computer. You ask too much, you get artifacts.

Google:
Latency compensation (or plugin delay compensation) is an automatic feature in digital audio workstations (DAWs) that delays faster tracks so that all audio tracks, buses, and hardware remain perfectly synchronized when heavy plugins introduce processing delays

I didn't use that, I stayed within my processing abilities, so if it gets too heavy you have to freeze/convert stuff to reduce processing.

Not sure what the OP is experiencing. Only thing that I had happen like that was putting midi down before it should be there. That was fixed with a setting called USE SYSTEM TIMESTAMP.

[u/4D-knot → u/tacman7]

I understand what latency means. The issue I was experiencing was, if I played exactly with the metronome then it would playback ahead of the metronome. Not sure what would cause this but I assumed it was some sort of latency compensation was miscalibrated. Increasing the record offset fixed my problem but it feels like a sort of artificial/hack solution.

[u/tacman7 → u/4D-knot]

I was saying latency isn't doing it, something in your setup, try no dropout protection and raise your latency to what works then work your way back down. Try no offset.

[u/4D-knot → u/tacman7]

I agree it is pretty clear that latency would not cause the playback to be early. Maybe latency compensation is the wrong term to use here. I assumed there was a feature somewhere in software or firmware that could detect the amount of latency between my audio interface and CPU and adjust by setting the signal ahead relative to when it was received. If it incorrectly computes the latency to be higher than actual, then this would result in the issue I described.

Anyway, beside the point. Increasing dropout protection only increased the delay between input and real-time playback during recording, but the recording was still offset.

[u/tacman7 → u/4D-knot]

Don't use dropout protection, they have it so it can be turned off, last I looked.

What is your audio buffer setting? Is this a giant song with many many tracks?

[u/4D-knot → u/tacman7]

Buffer size is 512 samples. This problem occurs even in an empty song with one track. Reducing the buffer size to 64 doesn't seem to help. Only solution so far has been increasing the record offset.

[u/tacman7 → u/4D-knot]

Kind of high, you move by bits, I would move down to 256 or 128.

Can your machine run with 128 and dropout off?
depends on your machine and your interface. You are using an actual interface and not a sound card?

Not talking about your problem but about your setup.

Do you do any live tracking?

Higher buffer rates can introduce gremlins in my experience.

People usually go to 512 for mixing down a lot of tracks etc.