I suspect a better interface would give me better results. With an inexpensive (160 USD) USB audio interface, running OS X on a MacBook Pro with an i5 processor, I can't get the round trip latency lower than about 6ms without really bad artifacts. I don't know much about those at this time. There are a few high-end products that combine an interface with dedicated DSP that can be used real-time or for editing and mixing, such as the UAD Apollo products.Īs JCPedroza commented, there are tools available to allow real-time processing using native CPU power. There are many audio interfaces available now that including some basic audio processing (e.q., EQ, reverb) as part of their low-latency monitoring digital mixers. If you want super-low latency digital audio processing, one option is to get dedicated processing power. I then use either a mixer or interface low-latency monitoring (a digital mixer built into the interface) to combine near-zero latency audio of the performance mixed with the existing backing tracks or click track. When I'm recording in a DAW channel, the channel is record armed but also muted. Therefore, I make sure I can always monitor without relying on audio routed through the DAW.
Larger buffers mean more samples of latency. In practice, I have always valued reliable recording, which means I want larger buffers, since a buffer underrun is a gap in the recording. Total round-trip latency for my current settings are about 12ms, which is not fast enough to record with. On my computer, I run the buffer for Ableton Live at 128 samples, which at 44.1 kHz is over 6 ms of latency, and that's one-way. At a 96 kHz sampling rate, that amounts to less than 1 ms. RME, for example, advertises a latency for their BabyFace interface as low as 14 samples for OS X drivers. If any plug-ins are part of the signal chain, it gets a lot messier, with some plug-ins introducing 500ms or more of latency (that's rare for most plug-ins but possible or even likely for look-ahead peak limiters or convolution reverbs). Latency is introduced by the analog to digital conversion process, and then by several different buffers, such as the bus buffer (e.g., the USB buffer) and usually at least two software buffers (from the driver and the DAW). There are many variables that affect total latency because there are several sources of latency.
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