benny37 Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 this is probably simple but any help would be much appreciated.... Im trying to run my guitar through the interface (firestudio) into mainstage guitar amps and there's this little delay between when i pick the note and when it sounds. It almost feels like playing a synth with the guitar, you know? Obviously, the digital amps are supposed have the feel of real ones, soooo... what's wrong here? thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmm42 Posted March 29, 2009 Share Posted March 29, 2009 this is probably simple but any help would be much appreciated.... Im trying to run my guitar through the interface (firestudio) into mainstage guitar amps and there's this little delay between when i pick the note and when it sounds. It almost feels like playing a synth with the guitar, you know? Obviously, the digital amps are supposed have the feel of real ones, soooo... what's wrong here? It's called "latency", which is the delay between a signal on the input to when it appears on the output. The delay depends on the A/D conversion in the input, signal processing and the D/A conversion on the output. The A/D - D/A conversion is fixed and can't be changed. The latency in the signal processing is depended on two factors: the buffer size (you can adjust that in the preferences) and the latency of certain plugins (some plugins need to look into the future, which adds some latency). MainStage doesn't have any plugins with more than 10ms (3rd party plugins might add more). The smaller the buffer size, the higher the load on the CPU. To go all the way down to 32 samples, you need a high-end audio interface and a quite fast computer. BTW: The latency also depends on the distance between you and the speaker (this is also true for analog). Every ft you are further away from the speaker adds 1ms of delay, which means if you are 10ft away, you will hear a 10ms delay, just because of the speed of sound. To cut this long story short: to reduce the latency on your system, set the buffer size in the audio preference to a smaller number, but the _largest_ that works for you, otherwise you make the system more instable for no reason (you can more easily get dropouts, etc) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benny37 Posted March 30, 2009 Author Share Posted March 30, 2009 that was super helpful!! thanks, I will try your suggestions this afternoon! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lohogan Posted July 20, 2009 Share Posted July 20, 2009 I was trying to use JackServer to hook GarageBand up to Mainstage so I can use the guitar rigs in GB with MS. The latency was out of hand, and there was also unacceptable delay with the pianos and such that don't go through GB. I had the latency set to 128 samples with the safety buffer checked. Just on a lark, I unchecked the safety buffer and tried it. Perfect! The pianos were awesome, and there wasn't any noticeable delay on the heavy metal guitar patch. If you have LATENCY issues, try UNCHECKING THE SAFETY BUFFER. (All in caps to help those who skim posts.) Now, what exactly does the safety buffer do? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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