I want to populate my usual project template (“Chris live”… I know, it’s named stupidly, but I have created it originally with a total different idea in mind, which turned out to be perfect for composing and tracking) with a few plugins, but some of them have a latency.
Also I like to use plugins already when tracking - some have latency, too.
Maybe I’m too stupid or blind or something, but where can I see the total latency including the plugins? That would be something…
Exactly, of course I can do that.
Question remains:
Why is there no easy to use, simple display of “Total latency: 6.0 ms input / 12.0 ms input to output”, close to ASIO meter or something?
I wonder, if:
a) Steinberg doesn’t know about the necessity of such things
or
b) They do know but don’t care because you can’t market such improvements
or
c) There is a backlog of 10 GB text of issues, tasks, user stories and features
or
d) A combination of a, b and c
And I also wonder:
Why do we never get a response? 
Probably not exactly the answer to your problems, but if you enable the “Constrain latency compensation”, it will disabled all plugins above a certain amount of latency (configurable, I think it defaults to something like 0.5ms). It will let you see directly which plugins are heavy and will allow to quickly switch between recording / live modes and editing / mixing modes.
I quite agree with this!
The soundcard latency and the max plugin latencies could very usefully be displayed alongside the RecordTimeMax and other items in the Project Window.
Here as well I would very much like to see a button to switch between my choice of two latency settings. I’m very often popping into the system to change the latency between my ‘mix’ latency which is high and my ‘live playing’ latency which is low. A button to do this would be most welcome. Then combined with the latency being displayed I’d have all the control and info at my fingertips.
I’d say that a feature request thread would at least bring this idea to Steinberg’s attention, and allow them to guage how popular the feature might be.
Mike.
I’ll do that.
Lets hope we can get this feature.
Gargoyle, isn’t that solved with the “Constrain Latency Compensation” button that already exists?
In the preferences, under VST there’s “Delay Compensation Threshold” which decides which plugins are disabled when Constrain is used.
No I don’t think so because there are two different ‘latency’ causes. One is the soundcard buffer size and the other is the delays introduced by the plugins.
We can control the soundcard latency and that’s what I’d like to be able to quickly switch. As we know, it’s a low latency for live playing of VSTi’s with potential ASIO spikes, versus a smooth and reliable ASIO delivery at high latencies. But it takes some time to nip into the System menu and tweak this each time.
The longest plugin chain then adds a further delay to the ‘system’ latency, and the Constrain Latency Compensation button limits this by disabling some plugins until the delay reaches the defined threshold, but it can’t reduce it below the current ASIO buffer (hence my need to switch).
Other DAWs implement a split buffer system, so that live channels use a different buffer size. I believe ProTools11 has just introduced this, but I haven’t upgraded yet so I can’t confirm.
Incidentally, on my system if I engage delay compensation then save, close, reload the project, then the button is still pressed (lit up) but delay compensation isn’t actually activated. Anyone else noticed this?
Mike.