Mainstage 2 Playback & Latency

Hi

Developing backing tracks in Logic 9 to accompany live guitar, bass and vocals via a Motu Ultralite.

Using the Playback facility, as up to 8 tracks of audio (bass drum, snare, hats, etc on each channel) provides greater mix flexibility when setting up live (rather than bounce everything to one track and then find the mix is incorrect for the room.

Anyway, I have an observation and wondered if anyone had any feedback on this.

Latency is near zero for the guitars, until I bring an 8 channel mixer into the patch. So I would have Bass, gtr, vox and an 8 channel playback mixer across my channel strips.

My observation is the "Adlimit" limiter that is added to the master output when you install the 8 channel template. Bypassing this appears to improve latency for the guitars.

Is there any reason for this? Is this really the solution?

And is there any other advice anyone has for how I want to set this up i.e. each patch is a song, with channel strips for bass, gtr, vox and playback (8 channel mixer).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Alan

Latency is near zero for the guitars, until I bring an 8 channel mixer into the patch. So I would have Bass, gtr, vox and an 8 channel playback mixer across my channel strips.

 

My observation is the "Adlimit" limiter that is added to the master output when you install the 8 channel template. Bypassing this appears to improve latency for the guitars.

The Adaptive Limiter needs a Lookahead, which can be adjusted in ms if you click on the little triangle in the UI. It can be adjusted between 20..200ms and that will be your latency! Which means: in most cases you can't use the Adaptive Limiter live, but for certain effects, it might still makes sense.

MainStage 2 also has a latency display under the channel strip, which shows you the latency of that channel strip in ms. That should also clarify the issue.