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Can I turn off latency compensation
Hi folks,
I have a relatively complex looping patch built in loopy pro, but it’s doing this slightly odd thing. Whenever I loop audio it shifts it ahead of the live sound. If, for example, I get a loop going in a midi looper and then I sample the sound being played by that midi looper into an audio looper, it starts to sound like a flam, or like there is a 32 delay on the sounds. What’s even weirder is that the recorded audio is the sound that is playing first, so loopy is shifting it forward for some reason. I assume that reason is some kind of plug-in latency compensation.
Can I turn it off? Or is my only solution to go through and remove all plug-ins that have latency?
Comments
Sorry to post a question instead of an answer, but is it necessary to keep the live sound going once you've created the audio loop? That's an unusual practice.
Setting a follow action on the Finish Record event in the audio clip that mutes or stops the live midi or audio is the usual way to avoid this unavoidable delay.
Before I get into why it's unavoidable ... when you say "live sound", do you mean sound from plugins being played by MIDI?
(Loopy doesn't do latency compensation. What you're hearing isn't caused by Loopy moving the recorded audio ahead, but by the live audio being slightly delayed.)
Hey, thanks for the response.
No, it’s not necessary, and it’s not my working practice. I’m using it as a way to try and analyse whats going on. That said, the time shift is really noticeable and makes it hard to then play loops over the top of the existing loops, especially with rhythmic material.
Yes, live sound means sound coming from a plugin being played either by the midi loop or directly by me using onscreen keyboard or midi input.
So the live audio is delayed, but delayed compared to what? Sure, let’s say there’s a small amount of latency, audio buffer set to 32 samples, which is well below the threshold that i feel when I play. I’m pretty sure none of the plugins I’m using add extra latency. The time difference between the audio feeding into the looper and the audio looping is really noticeable, like 350ms or so.
But as I mentioned, what’s wierd is that it’s ahead… is there some lag in the audio stream that comes after the looper is recording? I just want the looper to record what I’m hearing and play it back as I’m hearing it. If that means including the latency I’m playing with, that’s great, but I don’t want the loops ending up shifted ahead of the audio that’s coming live out of the system.
If this is a result of the audio engine in loopy recording ahead of the some latency in the audio stream that affects the output (although that doesn’t seem right, as I’m not feeling that level of latency when playing sounds), is there a way to tweak the loops so that they are slightly delayed, to match up with live audio coming out of the system?
It would help to have a slow clear demonstration starting from scratch so that we can see/hear what is going on. From your description it is hard to know.
Also, check to see if you have any synching turned on in the sync settings.
A flam is a much shorter offset than a 32nd note. A small flam would not be surprising . A 32nd note offset would.
350 ms is just weird. If that's the case then there has to be something else going on. Do you have a limiter with lookahead in the input chain? Even then, that's way, way more than expected. Is this with every plugin instrument, or just one? Where is the midi coming from - from inside Loopy Pro, or from an external source?
You're always going to get some little bit of latency from midi triggering a plugin. As you mention, it should normally be only one buffer length. However, you will hear that as flanging or ... in the case of extreme delay ... flamming. That is unavoidable and can be avoided by simply not overlapping played midi patterns triggering synths and the recorded output. There are ways to still be able to layer in parts without having the original, redundant, midi pattern playing over the recorded audio loop.
Beyond that, to get to the bottom of the excessive latency you're reporting, details of your setup are needed. At a minimum, a screen shot of the mixer showing all audio and midi routing. Preferably a YouTube video showing the issue occurring.
Yes, there are ways of shifting individual loops to play later. But it makes more sense to fully understand the root of the issue before resorting to a brute force correction that would require manual shifting of every loop recorded.
What’s the easiest way to send that to the forum? A video? Is that possible.
If I make a simple project from scratch, set up a midi looper triggering a sampler, and then feed that sampler to an audio looper, there is almost no latency. Minor phasing, but perfectly usable. In my larger project, with 8 colour Channels, the difference is more like a slap back delay, so yeah, bit. more than a flam. It makes layering up rhythm parts completely impossible, because you play another part in so it feels right with the looping audio, and then it’s gets shifted ahead once looped, completely wrecking the groove.
Direct uploading of videos isn't possible on the forum. Generally people create an unlisted YouTube video and post the link. Some save the video to a service such as Dropbox and post a sharing link.
If posting a video only, it helps a lot if all the relevant settings such as the mixer and the plugins being used are covered. Often there's not enough detail to see what's going on.
Ok. I did an unlisted video like you suggested.
https://youtube.com/shorts/D_Y-6vIVVSY?si=3lIijmn0601LxDTn
Apologies, I think I failed to flip it (portrait now seems to be the default for video media).
I say at one point 64ms latency. Obviously that’s wrong, it’s 64 samples. Low enough that playing drum sounds live with the onscreen keyboard feels tight and responsive.
I just can’t work out why it would be shifting the loops ahead of the live sound by a significant amount? I’m using a midi loop in this instance as it makes it possible to hear the difference easily, but it’s the same if you play in live.
@manhippo : it is a bit hard to follow what s going on (partly because of the video orientation). It sounds like something might not be set up correctly.
Can you correct the orientation and reupload the video AND post still screenshots taken on the iPad of:
@manhippo
https://youtube.com/shorts/Qr9XaFcLP6Y?si=NMG7uI7ikXo5WDC3
Update. After rerouting a few things I found that the loop through my fx bus was apparently the cause of the delay. I created a new bus and looped the audio through that. Delay gone…
Then I set up all the routing as before to the new bus and one by one moved my fx over from the old bus… delay still gone. Effectively exactly the same routing, setup and plug-ins, but now no delay.
Which is great, but worrying to me that I don’t know what caused it…