EXCESSIVE Latency when RECORDING

Lately I've been having lots of problems experience very high latency when recording.

For example, I'll have about 10 tracks with mostly Logic, Waves and iZotope & Waves on the master output.

Audio preferences > I/O buffer have tried all different sizes.

No luck.

Only if I turn on "Low Latency Mode" am I able to record without all the excessive latency.

In the past I've never experienced this crap before!

Any tips & pointers on how to resolve this would be helpful & welcome.

Thanks

Well, you've set yourself up for that crap by putting izotope (which quite probably does something that takes time => latency) on the Stereo Out.

Luckily, Low Latency Mode is designed for exactly this case, and even better that you've found it already.

Using Low Latency mode for recording, is a workaround, for the non-ability of logic, of correctly compensating the latency which is induced in the monitor-chain, on the recording.

I really like Logic for its efficiency, but it really has its weaknesses.

Then please do tell how Logic could fetch audio that you haven't recorded yet (or MIDI that you haven't played yet which causes audio) early enough to compensate for a latency inducing plugin that wants to process that audio.

When turning on Low Latency the output volume goes way down making it hard for me to hear the tracks that are playing back as well as the one being recorded.

I said nothing about having Logic fetch audio that is not recorded.

My question is, is there a way to record without latency in the situation I described without having use use Low Latency mode.

Thanks for the detailed info and explanation. Very helpful.

Using Low Latency mode for recording, is a workaround, for the non-ability of logic, of correctly compensating the latency which is induced in the monitor-chain, on the recording. I really like Logic for its efficiency, but it really has its weaknesses.

 

Yes, Logic can neither predict what you are going to play before you play it, or turn back time, and both of these can be considered "weaknesses of Logic".

 

You could always file a feature request.

 

More seriously, you're probably not understanding what latency is or how it's compensated. If you have added a plugin on the master bus, say, and it requires a hypothetical 0.5 seconds of latency (that is, it requires 0.5 seconds of audio to perform whatever DSP process it needs to do), it means that without compensation, the whole master bus will be 0.5 seconds later than it is going into the plugin.

 

Now, if whatever is feeding that bus is just, say, audio tracks, then handling it is easy enough - Logic simply starts reading out the audio track data 0.5 seconds *before* it would normally occur, so that by the time it comes out of the stereo bus, it's being delayed by 0.5 seconds and it then occurs in normal time.

 

It follows then that *this cannot be done while recording* - Logic is recording whatever comes into it, and to properly compensate for this latency while recording, Logic would have to receive the recording 0.5 seconds *before it happens*, which is clearly non-sensical. (If you think there's another DAW out there that can do this, please let me know! )

 

For these cases, Low Latency Mode was added, which turns off plugins which delay the audio too much to cause timing problems while recording. It's a compromise, for the plugins which require too much latency. If this doesn't work for you, and it's important to hear the mix *exactly* how it is while still tracking, then your best solution is to either only use plugins which don't generate latency, or use analog hardware for these purposes.

I said nothing about having Logic fetch audio that is not recorded.

Yet this is what you ask Logic to do when recording something that goes through a latency-inducing plugin.

My question is, is there a way to record without latency in the situation I described without having use use Low Latency mode.

Yes. Don't use latency-inducing plugins unless you're finished recording and overdubbing. A plain vanilla stock Logic Compressor can give you plenty of monitoring gain and has a Limiter thrown in for free. No need for fancy iZotope and Waves stuff on the mix buss unless you really need the extra features which is quite probably not during recording.

When turning on Low Latency the output volume goes way down making it hard for me to hear the tracks that are playing back as well as the one being recorded.

Then you're adding a lot of gain with one of the plugins that is deactivated under low latency mode, and when that plugin is disabled, the volume returns to the level on the channel before that plugin insert. You can always bump up the gain with a gain plugin before the disabled plugin, by the gain thing is how you've set things up, not something inherent in the latency compensation situation. Now you know how to manage it, anyway.

This is a misunderstanding. Of course logic cannot compensate the latency in a live monitoring chain, this is not possible until the time machine will be invented. When this was the issue of the thread owner, yes Low Latency mode can help.

(DAWs have different strategies to deal with it. Some bypass instruments/live audio automatically to the output which is much more clever, Logic uses a Low Latency Mode.)

What I'm talking about is, when you record audio, and there is a lot of latency in the output chain, and Aux etc., and your hear this latency induced audio signal, and playing a instrument to it or singing a sweet melody to it, and you hear the direct audio from the instrument right into your ear and play along to the music. In this moment logic is in fully knowledge about the playback latency, an could simply subtract that latency when it put the recorded audio on the project. But it doesn't. Sorry for interrupting this thread.

bypass instruments/live audio automatically to the output

Like, not feeding them through latency inducing plugins. Yes. I get that. Logic is bypassing these plugins (and only the ones with high latency) to achieve exactly that.

and you hear the direct audio from the instrument right into your ear

Which you can't since you have earphones on and thus need/want to hear your instrument/voice through Logic with EQ, Compressor and some basic reverb. Don't think for a second that you can impose this workflow on a musician and/or a paying client.

What I meant to say to hear the music direct, can be just be meant as a synonym to have a direct monitoring path, bypassing the sound card.

Whatever if you like to use monitoring through logic (even of it adds latency through the sound device) you free are to do that. I have no problem with that.

I‘m just taking about a problem, which you may don’t have because you have a different workflow which your paying clients prefer