How to Solve Latency (With Any Recording Setup)

Recording delay will cause a poor performance, and timing issues. If you are having problems with latency, or recording lag, this video is a must watch. We go in detail about the various causes of latency, and several solutions that can work in any recording setup. This is important to understand for recording studio's, and home recording setups that want professional quality audio recordings. These strategies for reducing latency work with Focusrite, Audient, SSL, Motu, Behringer or any audio recording interface and any daw.

It can be frustrating trying to record a video and find that the audio and video are lagging behind each other. In this video, I'm going to show you a simple way to solve the recording lag problem, no matter what your recording setup is. By following these steps, you'll be able to record videos with no delay or lag!
In this video, we'll show you how to solve recording lag (aka recording delay) with any recording setup. By following this simple guide, you'll be able to fix any recording issue, no matter how big!

By understanding recording lag (aka recording delay), you'll be able to fix any issue before it becomes a problem. Watch this video to learn how to solve recording lag with any recording setup, and be prepared for any recordings you make in the future!

[kelvinfunkner]

definitely one of the clearest and most concise videos on the subject I've seen yet. nicely done!

[yiranimal]

Great video! Really appreciate how clearly it's laid out, as well as taking the time to spell out the acronyms. The learning curve is made infinitely more frustrating when everything is explained too quickly and only using acronyms.

[octaviohenrique.n]

Thanks man! Excelent video! Cheers from Brazil
Stay awesome!

[Faraday]

This is the best explanation I have seen on YouTube in terms of correctness and understandability. And thanks for not being silly or over the top as some YouTubers are, often to camouflage their lack of knowledge. The music is a bit distracting, especially for people from the U.S., Liberia, or Myanmar.

[seaburgsongs]

I am a beginner (used a portastudio back in the day, lol). I literally quit trying to record anything because of latency. Thanks for your awesome explanation! I think I'll get an inexpensive analog mixer and try that route. I subscribed . . . again, thanks!

[edmatzenik]

I've had dreadful tales of woe with laptops - until I found what was wrong. Many of them not only give varying latency with changing temperature they also just throw away information when the music gets to a tacit. The musicians get the blame until, as I say, you figure out what the computer has done. And here's a handy tip once you are working with a halfway decent computer: run a sharp click off one track and pick it up with a microphone, now make a three or four second WAV with the two clicks, you can use that as a little ruler to visually slide all your overdubs back that few milliseconds. Works great, I really recommend it. Thanks for covering the latency issue on youtube, you've cleared up a hell of a lot of points.

[arlandajim]

GREAT VIDEO, but the background music is really annoying.

[oysteinloland]

Thanks for sharing. I only wish the background music was much lower. On my laptop it's almost drowning out your voice

[jeknxis]

I would love to see a more in-depth video of setting up the analog monitoring. Really don't get how that setup is working.

[isnerdy]

For the most part, this video is very helpful. However, I do have a bit of an issue with the Thunderbolt vs. USB discussion towards the end. Thunderbolt is in fact faster than USB, and in a way that impacts latency, not just the number of channels you can run simultaneously. Thunderbolt is basically an external PCIe connection, and it has direct access to your computer's memory. It's not just a little more efficient in how it routes data to memory, it gives your audio interface the ability to directly read from and write to the memory inside your computer, without having to go through the whole USB subsystem, etc. USB 2 is also a half-duplex connection, whereas Thunderbolt is full-duplex. What that means is that a USB connection has to switch back and forth in 1ms intervals, taking turns sending and receiving data, while a Thunderbolt connection can send and receive at the same time continuously. The result of this is that for companies that are still pursuing Thunderbolt in their interfaces, latency is continuing to drop. The NTP DAD AX Center, for example, has a round-trip latency of 0.67ms over Thunderbolt 3 at 96 kHz with a 32 sample buffer. The very best USB interfaces and drivers have hit a wall at about 2.1 ms RTL at 96 kHz, 32 sample buffer. Due to the half-duplex nature of USB-2, it's basically impossible to achieve sub-2ms latency over that protocol, whereas latency on Thunderbolt interfaces keeps improving well below that threshold.

One area where the total bandwidth could be a real consideration is this: 32-bit float is starting to be available on more and more interfaces. I have an interface from 2017 that works in 32-bit float natively, and there are some good reasons to want to use it. It gives you enough dynamic range that you can recover from bad gain settings after the fact. However, with 32-bit float, each sample takes up 33% more bits than 24-bit. When you stack that up in a multi-channel setup, you start to run into bandwidth limitations. A 32 channel system (not all that uncommon in studios, and way too small for many touring setups) would completely saturate a USB 2.0 connection in 32-bit float (even though the link speed would suggest otherwise, the whole half-duplex thing comes into play here, too).

RME has done a really good job of selling people on USB, due to the fact that they've written some solid drivers, and they make hardware that people love. They also have a great track record of providing long-terms support for their products. Unfortunately, they are also perpetuating technological views that are not based entirely in fact, and I think that's doing a disservice to the industry. There are really only two substantive reasons why I've seen some interface manufacturers moving away from Thunderbolt: ongoing chip shortages, and not wanting to have to pay software engineers to maintain both Thunderbolt and USB drivers when cheaper USB-only interfaces sell much better. However, Thunderbolt is persisting in the high-end of the interface market, because it has concrete advantages.

[americatunedright]

This has always been the way, one reason why I love Grace pres. good vid. Interface like Hilo or others with a matrix are valuable.

[DMSBrian]

If you're on Linux in particular, you should pay attention to number of periods per buffer, the default is very high and changing it is not very obvious in DAWs like Bitwig, especially when using Pipewire/Wireplumber. The default is quite high iirc which causes high latency, the rule of thumb is to set it to 2 or 3, maybe 4, iirc 3 works best for most people, me included. This is a kernel setting for handling block devices, configurable through Alsa (or indrectly through e.g. Wireplumber or when using Jack with qjackctl), it also exists on Windows but there it is set to 2 by default and doesn't cause any issues there.

[sylvaindion]

Oh darn, this is a revelation for me. I new something was not right but I could not figure out what it was, my DAW latency is very low. Me and the lead signer when recording our band live (all analog no monitoring), had almost perfect pitch and that even whit a crazy loud drummer (can't complane he is one of the best). But when recording in our little home studio it was a complete different ball game, we were always a bit off tune no mater what. The worst is that, I have all the equipement for monitoring direct.
I will change my set up and try it in the days ahead.
Thanks a millions Chris.
PS Sorry for my bizard accent ;-)

[Okewen]

Thank you very much for sharing your hard earned lab results, and I don't mean just this video. This is what guys and girls need to cut through the bs. I commend you

[astrofishtix]

reluctantly subscribing cause you blew my ears out with your obnoxiously loud white noise

[mixedbyedd]

I work with many singers who like using auto-tune during tracking, even for subtle pitch adjustments. While I'd pick the Apollo x8 again, the Aurora N converters do sound better. I wish the Lynx system had DSP like auto-tune. Personally, I'd prefer direct monitoring for lower latency, but I stick with DAW monitoring for efx.

[Necropheliac]

I was really pleased to see my MacBook Pro only had 2.2 ms latency from pro tools with 128 sample rate. I had to stop using my PC because my graphics card was causing noise in the signal chain for some reason.

[stevemessruther]

very good information but you really should have turned down the music in the back ground - we want to listen to you not some back ground music :)

[liviu-cristiangavrilet]

Great video, really helpful however I would like to point out that to my knowledge the BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System!

[derrickmills]

you have geiven me a deeper understanding of latency thank you