Logic Pro 8 Latency and the Freeze function

I

ivan

Logician
I'm curious whether using the freeze function would help alleviate any latency in my system. I'm recording on a laptop, so every little bit helps.

I'll often program a midi drum track and then record guitar parts over it, and I'm wondering if I could eliminate any latency by freezing the drum track before I start recording the guitar. Any thoughts?

Thanks
 
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ivan said:
I'm curious whether using the freeze function would help alleviate any latency in my system. I'm recording on a laptop, so every little bit helps.

I'll often program a midi drum track and then record guitar parts over it, and I'm wondering if I could eliminate any latency by freezing the drum track before I start recording the guitar. Any thoughts?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I think doing this could get you CPU power, and that's only if your drum track involved a VI using quite significant amounts of CPU, but not reduce latency per se.

Latency is governed by hardware limitations first and software parameters second. So if you go into prefs and drag Logic's and/or your audio interface's audio buffer size to the very minimum, you have done the main thing you can do on the computer's end. Whether or not you can now play back your song in Logic in real time without a core overload or audio breakup occurring is entirely dependent on the CPU drain of the song's content and how powerful the audio interface is, as the actions we just took have put the hardware under maximum stress.

Now... if you found, for instance, that you couldn't run the song or recording process in real time with audio buffer set to the minimum, with those drums of yours in the song, but that if you froze the drums, you could, only then have you really made a latency reducing gain. But this particular set of 'tipping point' circumstances seems v unlikely to occur.

You say you're using a laptop. If you're using the onboard sound card of a Macbook, the bad news is that the audio card even in the Macbook Pros is actually worse, native latency wise, than those in G5 desktops made 4 years earlier. I can't speak for the very latest round of Macbooks, but that was the situation between 2004-2008.
 
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Hey Wade, thanks for your response. I've never been clear on exactly what buffer-size was and what it affects, so this helps a lot!

I'm using a PowerBook G4 from 2005, but I also have an M-Audio firewire interface (one guitar in, one mic in) that I often use. It always seemed counter-intuitive to me that I could achieve lower latency when I have to run through an additional device on the way to the computer, but I guess it ain't all that simple 😉

Thanks again.
Ivan
 
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No worries. Yeah, since the M-Audio is the only way to get your guitar audio into the computer, it's going to be the determiner of latency when recording guitar. So just try dialing its audio buffer to the minimum setting next time you use it. That minimises potential latency and puts pressure on the computer, and if Logic can keep up with the song/your recording at that setting, it's Hooray Time. But if you get overloads or hiccups, increase the buffer size a step at a time, trying to do what you wanna do at each level. As soon as you have a level that works without hiccups, whatever latency you're then experiencing is as low as you'll be achieve with that particular setup.
 
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