Turning off individual plugins vs turning off entire FX bin, archiving tracks etc to improve latency?

[Christian Jones]

As I use amp sims I find the more plugs I have going in a session my latency will start to suffer. I run at 64 and often 128 and refuse to go higher than that.

 So specifically in regards to how my latency is affected, I'm trying to get a solid grasp on what does what when talking about turning off plugins on tracks vs turning off the entire FX bin, and archiving tracks if there's any data on them, or even just archiving a track that has several plugins on it but no audio yet, and of course freezing tracks. This stuff's in the manual, but I'm trying to get a definitive grasp on what actions improve my latency. 

In amp sim world, I often split my signal w/ a hardware splitter and send it to two inputs on my audio interface and run a dual amp sim rig. Each amp rig consists of the initial DI track (usualy w/ the fader down) which gets sent to an aux that has the amp sim, then that aux will often be sent to yet another aux where I may have an effect of some kind like an octaver. So I'll have two of these rigs running to simulate two amp rigs, and I do ok w/ this at 64 or 128. But the more plugins that get added on various tracks or even maybe just the audio on the tracks, my latency starts to become noticeable.

Often I'm testing out various rigs I build within a working session.. So what can I temporally turn off, disable, archive etc to help restore my latency is those cases? 

[bitflipper]

Disabling a plugin may or may not affect overall latency. While it does reduce CPU usage and thus accommodate smaller buffers, SONAR still has to consider the latency that plugin would have added when calculating plugin delay compensation, in case you want to re-enable it mid-playback. Amp sims typically include effects (e.g. EQs, delays and reverbs) that are inherently latency-increasing regardless of CPU demands.

The only way to guarantee lowered latency is to print the track by baking in the fx with a freeze, after which SONAR is free to treat it as a simple audio track with no extra processing. (Well, it's not the only way; you could archive the track, but only if you don't want to hear it anymore, e.g. a click track or unused takes).

[scook]

Bypass is bypass whether activated globally, at the rack or effect level. Of course, anything other than a global bypass may not reduce PDC.

18 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

So what can I temporally turn off, disable, archive etc to help restore my latency is those cases? 

Try going about this the other way

• Enable Global Bypass, then
• Toggle the rack/effect bypass buttons until the latency becomes unacceptable.

It may take some experimentation. Some plug-ins have variable PDC. For example, amp sims have various ways to set them up and some of the effects in the plug-in may need more time to process than others.