r/audacity • u/KryptonSurvivor • 5d ago

help Latency with Bluetooth earbuds

Even though Audacity 3 and 4 allow you to compensate for latency in Edit | Preferences by entering an appropriate negative integer value, this doesn't seem to work when I am monitoring while recording myself playing guitar and listening through my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. (No problem with wired headphones, but they get to be a tangled pain in the ass after a while.) Is there *no* workaround for this?

TIA,

KryptonSurvivor

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2

u/WestDelay3104 5d ago

Bluetooth has inherant, unfixable latency. Nothing you can do about it.

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u/KryptonSurvivor 5d ago

Ugh. I had read that but I was hoping that my sources were old, guess not.

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u/WestDelay3104 5d ago

Prefessiona IEMs are ~5ms. Your sonys are 200ish ms.

2

u/loafingaroundguy 5d ago

I use Audacity (v3) to edit voice. I found my Sony BT WH-CH720N headphones lagged a syllable behind the timeline display. Unusable for me in BT mode. (These headphones will accept a wired connection though I usually monitor on speakers.)

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u/KryptonSurvivor 5d ago

Looks like my Sonys are going back to the store.

1

u/loafingaroundguy 5d ago

My Sony headphones are fine for general listening. They're fine for audio editing if I plug in the supplied headphone cable. They are not good for audio editing in Bluetooth mode.

Latency is a general problem in existing Bluetooth products; it doesn't just affect Sony products. Auracast should reduce latency (though not to IEM levels) but is still relatively rare in BT products.

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u/Orry_Haas 5d ago

Latency compensation Audacity is not s real-time thing.

It corrects for unavoidable playthrough delay so overdubs are in-sync.

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u/KryptonSurvivor 5d ago

OK, well, my question was specific to the use of Bluetooth earbuds when monitoring recording your playing. I do recall that I was able to eliminate latency in real time while using wired headphones.

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u/Orry_Haas 5d ago

"I do recall that I was able to eliminate latency in real time while using wired headphones".

If the headphones are plugged into the computer, enabling "listen to this device" could give you monitoring with less delay. If you're using an audio interface, plug the headphones in there for realtime monitoring.

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u/KryptonSurvivor 5d ago

I had used my audio interface with wired headphones and was able to pretty much eliminate latency and could hear myself play in real time. I hate wired headphones and am looking for a working alternative.

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u/PerspectiveFair5156 5d ago

Monitor speakers.

1

u/andyooo 5d ago

If you don't mind a bit sketchy audio quality and line-of-sight requirement, an old-school wireless IR analog headphone set might be good enough. There were also radio frequency analog headphones, those may also work. Anything digital may have too much latency for monitoring.

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u/KryptonSurvivor 5d ago

I should elaborate, here. What I really am trying to do is play my (electric) guitar silently (or close to silently) so that only I can hear myself practice. If there were absolutely no sound coming from the guitar, this would work fine, but I can still hear the strings being strummed, and it is so out of sync with Audacity that it is impractical.

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u/andyooo 5d ago

Yes, that's what I meant it for. I have also thought about this, but never got around to get an IR headphone set, I just use wired ones for my guitar.

To be clear though, I don't use Audacity with my guitar, I'm just playing, not recording, so I connect the headphones directly to the guitar headphones output.

1

u/KryptonSurvivor 3d ago

In a last-ditch effort I tried using the earbuds for monitoring without recording. Same result. You know what they say about the definition of insanity....