ForumsSoftware ← Aalto triples your plug-in buffer latency!!?

I thought this was strange. Aalto reports 5.8 ms of latency (working at 44.1). Most plug-in instruments I have no not have latency (none reported) except Alchemy and Addictive Keys which report 1.5 ms. All the effects I have are usually no latency or under 1ms.

5.8 ms seems quite high for an instrument. Is this correct? Why does it have such high latency?

thanks

edit: apparently Aalto adds twice your plug-in buffer in latency, thus tripling your plug-in latency!

I will look into this... after I get the 1.3.0 release out. Meanwhile please let me know what host / operating system you are talking about!

I am on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion and I use Ableton Live and Studio One 2. Ableton Live does not tell you what a plug-ins latency is, but it is affected by it. Studio One is handy because it displays a plug-ins reported latency in the status bar at the bottom. For Aalto it is 5.8 ms.

I thought it was strange because the highest I've seen from a plug-in instrument previously was about 1/4 of that (1.5ms). I stay away from plug-ins with latency in Live, the highest effect latency I have is 0.2 ms.

Thanks for looking into it. I know plug-ins don't always report their latency correctly. It would great to find out that Aalto was just reporting it wrong!

It's also interesting that 5.8*44.1 = 255.8 (so latency is 256 samples)

Studio One's latency reporting is only one decimal place so the 5.8 isn't exact. So I'm sure it's a latency of 256 samples. So that's one of those binary rounded up type numbers ;) Maybe the whole latency isn't needed?

Unfortunately Ableton Live doesn't compensate plug-in latency in automation or tempo-based plug-ins like beatrepeat etc. so any tempo information gets off by the amount of a plug-ins latency.

In ableton the AU version has weird latency issues, use the vst version and it will function much better...

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I've never used the AU. I only use the VST. I haven't had issues, I just see the latency of the VST in Studio One. 6ms could conceivably add to bad timing in Live in some situations though. And it's quite high for an instrument so it would be great if that could be improved.

I just tested the VST in Ableton. I used my debugging information to see that the latency does go down to 16 just fine. The latency in Aalto will always be the next power-of-two greater than the process buffer size in the DAW, because MIDI messages are handled one buffer at a time.

You didn't say what process buffer size you were using in Studio One. In general any instrument plugin will have to have latency of one process buffer.

Oh sorry, I never realized you had written another post. Been a while since I checked in.

To answer your question though, I was using a 128 buffer setting in Studio One, so that makes sense that I was seeing Aalto reporting the equivalent of 256 extra samples of latency (in addition to plug-in buffer).

So that's interesting - Aalto adds latency of the next power of 2? I've never heard of a plug-in adding extra latency based on the DAW buffer. I mean, all plug-ins have in inherent minor latency of the buffer size, and some have a minor extra buffer added on top like 64 samples or so (Alchemy, addictive keys, 2caudio B2 to name a few), but adding the next power of 2 can actually be quite significant, even more than a static 256 buffer that I thought it was adding. If someone is mixing a track, using a high buffer to save cpu like 512 (not that high really), then Aalto would have a 1024 buffer as well! This could seriously cause some mayhem in Ableton Live.

I hope for V2 you can have Aalto not add extra latency. The only other synth that I know of that adds additional latency (beyond the plug-in buffer) is Alchemy, which as I said is only 64 samples.
So there's my official V2 request. No more variable/huge latency buffer. :)