And welcome to my latest attempt to monetize my hobbies in order to live in a world that is hosted by Jeff Bezos. Today we’re going to talk about latency, what the hell it is, how it might affect you, and specifically how to control it within the Reaper environment. Latency is measured in milliseconds and it is how long it takes for an input to go into a microphone down the cable into an audio interface into your DAW into your computer processed and then returned whatever that information is.
In this case, it is the sound of my voice. It could also be a guitar, a bass, a keyboard, drums, whatever. Uh you want as little latency as possible. And while there’s always some, uh, it is almost always imperceptible until it gets out of control. You don’t need to do the test where you touch your nose and then you figure out how long it took before your nose was touched till you realize that you touched your nose. It’s ridiculous and you’ve probably done it.
The thing is, it’s imperceptible, but there is a delay. It’s there. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s probably a function of spacetime and we’re going to move on. So as power processing requirements increase the computer’s ability to produce sounds in the allotted time meaning the reasonable amount of latency it decreases. As this decreases you start hearing pops and cracks a host of other interesting noises and as that increases it will eventually become a situation where it is impossible to work.
So when this happens you can buy a beefier computer. You can adjust your buffer and recording settings or you can stop using so many plugins, go get some proper gear and record properly. So, you can either spend 10k on a computer, you can take 10 years to learn how to record actual drums, or you can adjust your settings. We’re going to do the settings adjustment because I don’t have the money or the time to do the other. So, here we go. All right.
So, now we’re going to look at our buffer settings, uh, and several other things. Let’s see. Here we go. We need to go to options, preferences, and then we’re going to look at buffering. It’s probably going to open on device. There we go. So, let’s make sure request sample rate is checked under device. Why do we want that checked? This is going to let you control your audio interface from Reaper.
So, right now, Reaper is telling my audio interface, regardless of what other settings are in there, and there might be some, that we want the sample rate to be 441, and we want to request the block size. The block size I’m choosing is 128, and I’m going to come back to that in a minute. So, are we using the correct driver? This will be something else you’re going to want to check. I’m using a Focusright device and I’m using the Focusright USB AO driver. Good news, I’m using a Focusright USB device. I’m using the correct driver. If you don’t know if you’re using the correct driver, you’ve got bigger problems.
Go ahead and leave a question in the comment and tell me what audio device you’re using and what DAW you’re using. And then I’m going to tell you if it’s anything other than Reaper, you should probably be using Reaper. But I’ll try to help you out if I can. Now, let’s go to the buffering section because we need to talk about anticipative FX processing. What in the holy hell is that?
This will, if you have it clicked, excuse me, if you have it checked, which you want to have it checked, then it’s going to enhance the performance of your computer by pre-rendering certain audio effects ahead of the play head. And as you’ll notice, the default setting is 200 milliseconds. And do not touch that if you have to. You’ll find out later. Usually, and I don’t I’ve never had to change it, nor have I heard of anyone messing with it. Please don’t mess with it. This will reduce CPU spikes as you record. So, the clicks and the pops will event will be reduced greatly by having that checked. So, be sure you have it checked.
Now that you’ve got that checked, you’ve got your device checked. Now click okay and we can be done with that. I am there we go. So what is your actual buffer setting and and what should it be and how do we figure that out? Well, that’s a little bit more complicated than it sounds and you’re going to probably have to do some testing. So essentially you want the smallest buffer possible. Let’s go to looking at our buffer again. I have my block size or buffer set to 128. So what does that mean exactly?
Well, I must have started at 64 because I always do. These are the the blocks of information that you’re going to process at once. It’s actually more complicated than that, but that’s what we’re going to call it right now. So 64, think of it as 64-bit, 128 bit, 256 bit, on and on and on and on. These are going to be the size. This is going to be the size of your buffer. The larger the buffer size, the more latency you’re going to have.
So, you want the smallest amount of buffer that you can have and not star getting pops and clicks. I always start at 64 and see how we’re going. Now, as the recording continues and the number of plugins grow, the buffer size will likely need to grow and you will grow it to 128 at that point. If you still have clicks and pops, try it at 256, then try 512 and on. At 512, you’re going to have noticeable latency. It might not be crazy, but it’s going to be there. And uh it’s going to get weird. So, at that point, what do you do?
You’ve turned your lat, you’ve turned your block size up to 512. There’s still pops and clicks. How do you what do you do at that point? Do you spend 10K on this increasingly hypothetical computer? No, you don’t. Now, we’re going to cheat. Here’s what you do. As you can see, I’ve got guitar left, guitar right, bridge, guitar left, bridge, guitar right, bass, and drums. And they’re all going. Sounds great. So, what do we do? I’m getting pops and clicks. As you can tell, I’m not. But if I was, what would I do?
Well, I could increase the block size, but I’m already at 512. What do I do now? You can do several things. One thing I could do would be to turn off some of these plugins and use only absolutely what I need. Sounds terrible, right? That’s fine. But I do have drums or bass. If I want to record another guitar line with the other guitar processing turned off, I can do that. What else could I do if I didn’t want to record other stuff when the original sounds like garbage like that?
Well, I could actually render these tracks, pull them back in, and they would no longer need processing. Now, all of this adds complexity to the recording process, and it increases, well, it increases the pain in the ass exponentially the more you have to do this. So, number one, you may want to consider a better computer. So, what do we do? We have hit 512 on our buffer. We’re starting to hear latency. It’s difficult to work. And we started turning off plugins and we didn’t like the way it sounded. You’re going to run, you’re running out of options at this point.
The final option, as I mentioned before, is go ahead process as many of your tracks as you can ahead of time. So in the example that I have here, what I can do, I can go ahead and take guitar left and guitar right and print those tracks. I can process the tracks and pull them back into the job. Get rid of these. Well, save the dis. Don’t get rid of anything. Save the dis, but bring in the pre-processed tracks.
Then you don’t have to process the guitars anymore. they’re already a wave and you you’re not using in this case I’m using the Helix plugin but not anymore. Once you’ve printed it, you can just use it as a standard track as if you’d recorded it using actual gear which you might want to think about getting. Um, but it reduces the impact on your computer. So then at that point as you pre-process quote unquote these things by printing them, you can reduce the amount of latency by dropping your buffer back down.
Now all of this is hopefully unnecessary, but if you’re using an old laptop, you may have this problem, especially if you’re like me and using nothing but plugins. I do not have any actual amplifiers or drum sets or gears. I got real guitars and real real guitars and real cables. That’s it. Everything else is coming out of the computer. That means I got to have a beefier computer. I’ve got to have a bigger buffer or I’m just going to have to deal with a whole lot of latency.
Now, fortunately, I’ve made really big productions with 40 tracks, all of them with with uh plugins on them. And there is one final thing you could do. It’s not going to help you recording, but it will help you once you’re mixing and mastering. And that is while you’re recording, turn off as many plugins as you possibly can or print the tracks. That’s great stuff. But once you’re mixing and mastering, you can crank the buffer way up and the latency isn’t going to matter. At the higher ends, maybe, but you’re going to have to get really nuts.
But a 512 buffer while you’re just mixing and mastering. As long as you’re not actually having to produce new stuff while that buffer is that big, it’s not going to have any effect. So turn off what you got, turn off what you have to print what you have to get the recording done. But once the recording is done, you can crank the buffer up to whatever gets rid of all the pops and you’re going to be doing great. You won’t have any effective latency because you’re not producing new stuff. I hope that helps.
And I hope that this attempt at monetizing a hobby was uh useful and somehow allows me to continue existing. Have a great day. Have fun. If you have any questions about what we talked about, latency is actually very complicated, but the problem if you look at it from high enough is fairly simple. And uh if you’re still having problems after you try all this stuff, let me know and uh I’ll see if I can help. Have a great day.