How to Fix Latency in Cakewalk by Bandlab

in this video we'll be looking at how to fix latency in cakewalk by bandlab now if you're here because you're currently having problems with latency or you simply want to improve upon the performance with your current setup then stick around because we'll be working through a whole checklist of items you can look at to improve latency on your system so let's get started [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you will so i know it's super frustrating to be having latency issues which get in the way of your creative process and you may be in that position right at this moment and you wish i would just get straight to the point well i will but first of all i think it's important for you to understand that latency is something you manage both in your studio and throughout the course of a project often the only thing that sort of takes out of the equation sometimes is super expensive equipment and to be honest even with that if you have the settings wrong you can still experience latency so it's important that you look at all of the tips that i'm going to go through today which are going to help you to manage latency on all of your projects not just the current problem you have so let's get started with something i think is key and that's understanding what latency is so latency exhibits is a kind of a delay when it's set up well and you've got low latency and you say for example play a drum you'll get something like this however if you've got poor latency on your system then it's going to go something like this and it's going to be very difficult to play that drum i mean it's bad enough that it's invisible right so what's happening well the sound will be going through the microphone as it is now to your audio interface which converts it to a digital signal which can be used by the computer now the computer does a whole bunch of processing sends the sound back to the audio interface which turns into an analog signal and by the time all of that happens you get that delay it can happen with virtual instruments as well so you'll play a note on your keyboard and there'll be a delay between playing the note on the keyboard and the actual sound coming out that is what latency is it's extremely annoying so let's look at some basic approaches to overcoming latency during recording so one of the things that you can do to get near to zero latency is to take the computer out of the equation most modern audio interfaces have a feature which is usually called direct monitoring and what they do is they take the sound from for example the microphone it goes to the audio interface and then it goes straight back to your headphones or your monitors it doesn't use the computer to process the sound the computer is still recording the sound but it isn't sending anything back to the audio interface now that's all very well but there's one massive disadvantage and that's that you can't use the effects plugins which you have in cakewalk to enhance the sound as you're recording now i do have a kind of a workaround for that in a video i made a couple of weeks ago you can see that just there or better still wait till the end of this video and there'll be something on the end screen to take you there now with that approach it's very handy for adding things like reverb to vocals while you're recording and it kind of masks the latency effect but it's not very useful for example when you're recording electric guitars and you want to use an amp sim plug-in on cakewalk it's really not useful for that at all so we'll be talking about ways later that you can improve performance to do things like record electric guitars with amp sims now another approach that you can take is to get an audio interface which has something called dsp effects on board i use one called the presonus studio 192 that has reverb delay effects it has compression eq gates all that kind of nice stuff and i can use that during my recording without again the computer being involved because all of that is actually happening on the audio interface but those audio interfaces are much more expensive and you probably don't have one right now today that where you can fix this and i know that's what you want to do now the other thing that you can do if you have any effects processes lying around like rack units or maybe guitar pedals that kind of thing is to use a spare output and an input on your audio interface and create an effects loop so that you can hear the sound through your headphones and not record it now it does mean you have to have the appropriate inputs and outputs on your audio interface and it takes a little bit of jiggling around with i used to have it set up but i kind of avoided using it because it was a little bit complicated to set up the routing each time so but there is another option for you but really what you want to do if you can is improve the latency performance on your system so that you can employ at least a few effects while you're recording so let's take a look at that now so here we are in cape walk and i'm going to press p on the keyboard to bring up preferences and then i'm going to go down to where it says playback and recording and i want you to take note of the driver mode here i have it set to azio or seo however you pronounce it it's by far the best driver mode in terms of performance and therefore latency in cakewalk now it's possible that you don't have it available as a choice you click there you can see these other choices but you don't see asio now the most likely reason for that is that you're using the onboard sound on your computer a lot of people start out like that they get cakewalk just to try out so they use the onboard sound on their computer now i'm afraid to say you're never going to get great performance from your onboard sound and your computer in terms of latency i highly recommend that you do invest into a dedicated audio interface now the good news is they're really not very expensive at all these days so i'll put a link to a couple in the description down below and you should find with those that you get a massive increase in terms of performance with latency now the other reason it may not be available is you do have a dedicated audio interface but it doesn't have an asia driver that's very unusual and the other thing is that you may have an asio driver but you may not be happy with it for some reason in these cases i would recommend you get something called aco for all it's a free piece of software i'll put a link for that in the description and that definitely helps a lot of people i'm by no means an expert in it i don't use it that much but when i have used it i definitely found it useful so give that a try if you want to see some improvement there but if you do have a dedicated aco driver for your audio interface then i would try that first before using azio for all so the next thing i'll take a look at is driver settings so i'll click on that and this is where most of the magic happens in terms of improving latency i want you to look at this control down here which is buffer size it's a slider control and we can actually change our buffer size there which is going to affect our latency now sometimes i think this is grayed out for some users in which case you'll need to click on the aco panel control here that's going to bring up the software or the driver software for your audio interface and you should be able to change the buffer size there but mostly you'll see a slider available here now i've got this set to 128 samples at the moment and you can see down here that i have some different readings for that i have an input latency of 6.9 milliseconds output of 5.6 milliseconds and a total round trip of 12.5 milliseconds now you don't need to know what all that means but i would suggest that these are great ballpark figures if you can get somewhere near that then i find that this is very usable in terms of recording vocals guitar percussion and also when you're using virtual instruments so it's a great target to get to now you can improve upon this as i say by changing the buffer size if i change this now because i'm doing some screen recording it's actually going to make my audio engine crash so i won't do that what i did was i saved some screenshots from earlier on when i had it at different settings so that we can see how it affected the latency so one of the first ones i did was to put it all the way down to 16 samples the lowest possible setting in terms of buffer size and you can see that i had a round trip latency of 12 milliseconds before it's now down to 7.1 a massive improvement so why wouldn't i just do that all the time well the reason is that although i get better latency i also start to get other problems on my system i may get pops and clips or even drop outs on my audio and you really don't want that happening in the middle of a session you really want to have utmost confidence when you hit record that you're not not going to get a pop or a click or something which is going to ruin that awesome performance of yours so the idea is to get it to a level where it's safe where you're not going to get those issues but you still have a low enough latency so the next thing i tried was to put it at a very high setting so i put it all the way up to 2048 samples as well in this position i've got a very very stable system there's no chances of pops or clicks or dropouts or anything like that in my audio but look at the total round trip latency it's up to 98.5 milliseconds that's entirely unusable so the trick is to find a happy balance that place where you can get that buffer size down nice and low get a nice low latency but still have a decent performance now there's some other things which affect that as i say i had it on 120 i have 128 like this mostly so the other thing that can affect it is sample rate that's just up above the buffer size control there and you can see that i have it set to 48 000 or 48 kilohertz now this is a slightly unusual setting in the it's mostly a sort of standard for video i would recommend you have that set to uh 44 or 44 100 um or 44.1 kilohertz that's a very common setting for audio recording and really good enough for most releases that you're going to do now it is possible to set that to a higher sample rate depending on your audio interface and here's an interesting thing which happens when i change that to 96 kilohertz look at the effect it had it actually reduced my latency down to 7.4 that's a higher quality setting with a lower latency now before you get all excited and all goes setting your sample rate up much higher there is a trade-off you do find that it's way more likely that you're going to get pops and clicks that kind of thing but you may want to try this out it can't harm to try just see what happens if you get a decent latency and you can record a sample rate of 96 kilohertz then i would go for it but i find mostly that i'm really happy with 48 kilohertz especially when the project gets bigger and bigger and i've got more plug-ins and performance becomes more of an issue then that's a very important thing now the other thing that i would suggest you is that you do change these settings during the course of a project so for example while you're recording and actually doing takes you may want to get this latency down nice and low in which case you have that buffer size down low but it's perfectly appropriate once you get to that stage where you're mixing and you're starting to add in lots of plugins etc that you change that buffer size i sometimes put it all the way up to the top up to 2048 because at that point if i'm not recording i don't care if that's that delay that delay is only on playback it doesn't matter to me i can still do my mix so it's definitely a strategy to have the buffer size down low while you're recording and then up high while you're mixing but that does remind me it is good practice while you're recording or tracking not to have too many plugins in your system and this is one of the reasons why you shouldn't do that there's a whole bunch of other reasons which i won't get into now but try and keep your plugins to a minimum while you're doing the recording phase of your project so there are occasions where you really can't avoid using a plug-in the first of those is with virtual instruments because they are a plug-in and they can be very hungry in terms of using the cpu power of your computer the other occasion is when you're recording electric guitar and you really want to hear the sound of that guitar through an amp sim and that can really affect your performance again amp sims can be quite hungry so what do i do in these cases well the first thing i do is try and record it as early on as possible in the project before i've recorded all of the other instruments try and make this be one of the first instruments that i will record at that point not so much is going on in the project which is going to slow down the computer so that's one strategy you can use also don't put too many effects on you may find say when you're recording an electric guitar that it's okay to have the sound of the amp you don't really need to have the extra reverb or something like that on there as well so switch off any unnecessary effects when you're doing that or bypass them at least now there are also occasions when inspiration hits later or you really need to have all of those other instruments there before you record so that's what we're going to take a look at next so this is really a worst case scenario you're towards the end of a project you really need to record an instrument but you've already got 20 30 40 50 other instruments there and they're all using up cpu and you're having latency issues now if you push your buffer size down to get a nice low latency you've got far more chance of getting pops and clicks at this stage whereas if you put your buffer size up in order to account for that then you can have an unmanageable latency so what do we do in this case well i think it's important to understand first of all that your your computer isn't really struggling with the multiple streams of audio it can probably handle an awful lot of those before it really comes under strain it's really all of the plugins which cause an issue and also the virtual instruments now i'd recommend with plugins that you don't really add them till later in the project there's a good reason for that you don't really need to shape the sound of your instruments until you get to that mixing stage and you can hear them in the context of other instruments i don't really think it's great practice to create a sound for an instrument without hearing it alongside the other instruments it exists with now the added bonus if with this approach is that you won't be using up loads of cpu power now the other thing to take into account is any plugins that you have on the master bus there's some really famous plugins which go on the master bus which i have to say put a huge strain on cpu i've had lots of people email me about latency i asked them if they've got these plugins on the master bus they switch them off and they go up problem solved okay so you've done all of that but you've also then got virtual instruments which you can't really switch off you need to hear them while you're recording how do you cope with all of that what's the best solution i'll show that to you now and it involves using a feature in cape walk called freezing now you may have heard of this and you may have used it but you may often forget to use it in these circumstances and i can promise you it can make a massive amount of difference so what freezing does is it takes that track with it could be something like a virtual instrument or just an audio recording it takes that with its effects and it bounces it down to just plain audio it takes the effects out of memory it takes the virtual instrument out of memory none of those things are being processed anymore and we just get to hear the bounce down version of that particular track it's very easily done just by clicking on this kind of snow icon on each track now what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull up my task manager so that i can monitor my system performance this is a very simple track as you can see there's three virtual instruments they've all got two or three effects added to them already and i'm about to record that fourth track so let's see what's happening we're not even going to play or record anything here we'll just see what's happening with the memory and the cpu while we're not recording so i'm going to look at the memory here it's i'm using about 8.8 gigabytes of memory at the moment let's go ahead and start to freeze these tracks so we had 8.8 gigabytes i'll do the first one it does take a moment or two so i'll waffle on while it's doing that and as you can see after i've frozen the first one it's gone down to eight so went from eight point eight down to eight gigabytes i'll do the second one i think this one will be a little bit quicker and then after that i'll go ahead and immediately do the last one so it's just doing the last one now this went from 8.8 gigabytes of memory usage all the way down to 7.3 now that's massive just for three instruments i think you'll agree and if you're on a computer which i know a lot of you just have 16 gigabytes maybe some even only have eight gigabytes of ram then that's going to just be a lifesaver for you in terms of memory but it's not necessarily going to help all that much in terms of latency because latency is going to be affected more by cpu usage so i'll unfreeze all of those again you'll see my memory usage go back up and then i'll go over to my cpu usage now i'll let it settled for just a second and we can see that i'm using what around about 40 38 here of cpu usage with the current setup that i've got so let's see how that's changed as i start to freeze each one so i'll do the first one again wait for that to happen so we're on the high 30s up to 40 now we're down to 31 or so let's freeze the next one see how we go with that just doing that now and it's gone down to well now we're getting down to mid 20s we've gone for almost 40 a lot of the time down to mid 20s then i'll do the final of those three tracks there let's see what kind of magic happens so our cpu usability has gone sub 20 there we're down to 19 at one point there it does go up and down of course as the computer is doing it but a massive amount of difference in cpu usage there we've basically halved it there and that's just with three instruments imagine you have 10 15 instruments in your project or even more than that i have many projects which have something like 50 to 60 instruments in them so this is a really really really useful feature which i can't emphasize really enough don't forget it especially when you get towards the end of your project you can actually do it at any stage in your project you can just start freezing tracks once you're happy with them the good news is just because you're frozen doesn't mean you can't actually edit those tracks again you just have to unfreeze them momentarily you could just say just this one here unfreeze it and that takes it back to its original state where i can now adjust any of the plugins on it and i can actually make adjustments to the notes etc so it's not like it's gone forever once it's frozen so that's a really hot tip in terms of cpu usage so before we move on to my final tip i'd like to ask you for a small favor if you found this video useful at all could you make sure you hit the like button for me do that right away it lets youtube know that other people should see this video as well and of course if you do like this kind of content subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my other videos now if you've found lots of these videos especially about cakewalk useful then you may want to consider becoming a patreon there's a link for that in the description down below and for as little as one dollar per month you can help this channel out and it really does help me out thank you so much to those people who became patreons already now so for the final tip improving the performance of your pc is really really key you really want to optimize your pc one simple thing that you can do is make sure you don't have any other applications running in the background while you're using cakewalk and beware even a web browser can actually use up a lot of cpu power so definitely don't think oh it's only a web browser i'll leave that there switch it off unless you're watching me on a web browser now hang in for a few more seconds before you get back to cakewalk now the other thing you can do well there's quite a lot of other things that you can do there's a lot of optimizations you can do to your pc now rather than talk about that now i've actually got a video already made about that and you can see a link to that in the end screen so hang along for a few more seconds a little word of caution though with optimizing your pc and doing all of these tweaks you can really only hope for some performance improvement i don't think it's going to sort of fix really drastic problems that you've got with latency but every little does help sometimes so i highly recommend you check that out and give those optimizations a go and let me know how you get along now if you've got any questions at all please do ask me down in the comments there's an awful lot to discuss on this subject and you may have your own tips which i haven't thought of so i'd love to see them down in the comments so thank you so much for joining me in this video and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 34,281

Rating: 4.9808512 out of 5

Keywords: How to Fix Latency in Cakewalk by Bandlab, Latency, Cakewalk by Bandlab, Cakewalk, How to fix latency, Improve Latency, Latency Tutorial, Ho To, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, audio interface, recording delay, creative sauce, 2020, music production, home studio, audio lag, asio, asio4all, latency test, improve audio performance in cakewalk, sonar latency, improve latency, tutorial, how to record with effects and without latency, with no latency, creative, sauce, get rid of latency

Id: gW1ZW9_sgXo

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! Following on from a video I released a couple of weeks ago, I expand on various methods to fix or improve latency in Cakewalk.