Variable Latency in Cubase LE 4

[JonPorobil]

I kind of thought I was sliding under the radar, but a reviewer just noticed it, so here's a question for you all:

As many of you know, I switched from Adobe Audition 1.5 to Cubase LE 4 at the beginning of this year. It worked beautifully for two songs. Then I made the mistake of loading the software without my Lexicon Lambda device plugged in. This made Cubase lose track of the driver, and freak out accordingly. I finally figured out where to switch the driver, and after that my Lexicon appeared to play nice with Cubase, as the developers intended.

Ever since then, however, there's been a variable amount of latency. Audio recorded, in other words, will appear to come in later when played back. So I'll record vocals over a music bed and hit every cue perfectly, but when playing the audio back, it will sound as though I entered late on every line.

This doesn't seem to be a problem when the program first starts up. The longer the driver remains in use, the worse the latency is. If I go into the Device Setup menu, there's a "Reset" button I can press, and that brings the latency back down to 0 again, and it continues creeping up from there.

I've been doing two things to minimize the impact. First of all, I've been going into that menu and hitting the reset button often. Secondly, I've been manually aligning the tracks to compensate for issues where the difference is audible. Both of these are a huge hassle, and as of yesterday, I switched back to Audition until I can figure out how to resolve this issue.

Any suggestions?

[Billy's Little Trip]

Wow, that's a weird one. It actually gets worse as you use it, then you can reset it? I can't even begin to think of what that could be, other than CPU or driver issues.

But let me ask this. Are you saving and retrieving audio files from the computers on board hard drive that Cubase is on? Or do you save the files on an external drive?

I say this, because I've run into latency issues as well as other problems if I don't do all my song work on the computer that Cubase is on. When I finish a song, I then save everything on an external drive for storage. But I have to completely move it back if I want to work on it or make changes. This could just be in my case, but I thought I'd throw this out there.

[ken]

Do you have any plugins on when you are tracking?

[JonPorobil]

Wow, that's a weird one. It actually gets worse as you use it, then you can reset it? I can't even begin to think of what that could be, other than CPU or driver issues.

But let me ask this. Are you saving and retrieving audio files from the computers on board hard drive that Cubase is on? Or do you save the files on an external drive?

I say this, because I've run into latency issues as well as other problems if I don't do all my song work on the computer that Cubase is on. When I finish a song, I then save everything on an external drive for storage. But I have to completely move it back if I want to work on it or make changes. This could just be in my case, but I thought I'd throw this out there.

I'm saving the files to my local hard drive. Typically, I don't even have my externals plugged in. I will try defragmenting, though. Thanks for that inspiration.

Do you have any plugins on when you are tracking?

Not at first, though I do usually add some as I go. Next time, I'll try waiting until all the tracks are finished before adding plugins.

[JonPorobil]

It's been several months, and this issue never really went away.

This and several other little things in my recording setup have resulted in some "recording fatigue" on my part, which meant taking an unplanned break from recording for a while (about six weeks, as it happened). I think I'm ready to jump back on the horse, but unless I can get Cubase to reliably place the .wav files where I tell it to, it won't be worth continuing to use it.

So. Coming back to this issue, does anyone have any fresh insight into it?

[ken]

What does Cubase say your latency is? When you switch your driver it should show you the latency.

Here is a pretty good article about optimizing your computer for low latency: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan05/a ... sician.htm

[AJOwens]

If pressing Reset in the Audio Devices dialog box helps (and I've looked at the Lambda documentation online, and I assume this is a Mac and you are on the buffer settings page), that strongly suggests a driver problem (or possibly some kind of hardware problem) where the buffer is not getting flushed properly (although it's not clear what the Reset button does exactly -- it might just restore the factory defaults). Have you tried downloading and installing the latest driver for your hardware?

In the Audio Devices dialog box, are you set up to use the ASIO driver? Is it the same driver (by name) that's selected in Cubase LE? (I'm not sure it's even possible to mismatch them, but it's best to check.)

[JonPorobil]

If pressing Reset in the Audio Devices dialog box helps (and I've looked at the Lambda documentation online, and I assume this is a Mac and you are on the buffer settings page), that strongly suggests a driver problem (or possibly some kind of hardware problem) where the buffer is not getting flushed properly (although it's not clear what the Reset button does exactly -- it might just restore the factory defaults). Have you tried downloading and installing the latest driver for your hardware?

Actually, I'm running Windows XP, and looking at the ASIO Drivers dialog box. Yes, I'm running the latest drivers. And they were specifically designed to work with this version of Cubase.

In the Audio Devices dialog box, are you set up to use the ASIO driver? Is it the same driver (by name) that's selected in Cubase LE? (I'm not sure it's even possible to mismatch them, but it's best to check.)

By the "Audio Devices dialog box," do you mean the one in Windows (as opposed to the one in Cubase)? If so, then yes, the two match.

[AJOwens]

What I'm trying to figure out is why the Reset button clears the problem temporarily, because I think that's the best clue we've got. I've checked the online version of the manual for the Lexicon Lambda Pro to see what the Reset button actually does, but it's not very forthcoming, and anyway I'm not realy sure what page to look at.

Your other standard troubleshooting option is to swap out other things. Try the trial version of Reaper -- if that fixes it, the problem is with Cubase. See if some friendly person at your favourite music shop will lend you a different Lexicon Lambda unit for a few hours -- if that fixes it, it's your hardware.

[AJOwens]

OK, I've looked into this a bit. There are two kinds of latency issues. The most common is where you are trying to record, but the sounds are coming back through your monitors a little bit after you play them. This is easy to fix -- monitor your inputs instead of the recording track -- but anyway it's not your problem.

The second kind is where your newly-recorded track lags your other recorded tracks, even though they sounded in sync wile you were recording. This is the problem you describe.

I gather this has been addressed in modern times by "latency compensation," in which your recording software receives information from your sound driver about the delay between its input and ouput, and the recording software compensates by time-shifting your track for you automatically.

It's probably fair to guess that the recording software gets this information once and uses it throughout the session. If for some reason the latency worsens during the session, the recording software has out-of-date lag information, and fails to compensate enough. But there woud be no point in getting continuous updates during a session, because if the lag worsened during a track, there's nothing the recording software could do to compensate over all parts of the track.

This would make sense of the fact that a Reset works. At the Reset, the recording software gets the updated (worsened) latency figure, and then you're good to go for a while. If your audio device controls report the latency, you can check this yourself -- on this theory, the reported latency shoud be greater after a reset.

The question is why the latency gets worse. The most likely explanation is that your CPU gets busier during the session. Possibly with more tracks on the screen it has more to do - especially if you have an underpowered video card, or bad video drivers, or incorrect BIOS settings for your video hardware. Or (more probably, because your resets are issued when the video display is relatively quiet)) it could be that some software on your PC is winding up and taking more cycles -- an anti-virus program, for example, or (here's a prime suspect) the Windows Indexing Service, which I strongly advise disabling completely.

It all begns to make sense. Take Ken's advice and read up about optimizing your system. (The only part that doesn't make sense is that your system did not do this from Day One. Here we'd have to assume observational error.)

Hope that helps!

[AJOwens]

A link supplemental to Ken's:

http://www.jakeludington.com/ask_jake/2 ... video.html