last minute tracking latency issues. Need ideas.

[Michael Fogarty]

hi everyone. So, working on hour long ambient pieces. Two instances of Omnisphere full multi, East West Play full, various plugs and reverbs. Have to put my DAW up to 256 buffer. Realize there are some piano parts to tweak and would like to go down to 96 or even 128. Would be a simple solution to freeze the two Omnisphere instances, but have you tried freezing and unfreezing  an hour long track? Hmm. What I have done in the past is make an mp3 of the mix sans piano, and then open up another instance of Cakelab, do the piano part and import back  into original track. Any other ideas outside of a new computer? I'm a Gen3 Intel user so would have to build something new and not an option at the moment as just purchased a laptop for backup and live work. Would archiving the tracks help (not). Freeze just the section that needs the tweak? Play the piano part with my CLP tone for the tracking and then copy to Ravenscroft track? (not the best because sound and response very different.) I've done all these but looking for a quicker solution.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Michael Fogarty

[Starship Krupa]

The only thing that I can offer is that in many cases I find that shaving mS in driver latency doesn't affect playability of MIDI instruments as much as latency induced by FX PDC very much does. I poke around bus FX first, then on tracks the usual suspects like just about anything iZotope.

As someone who composes and plays in that genre, I understand that in many or even most instances, the effect is part of the instrument, or an instrument to itself (long delays and reverb tails), but it may be that it's not a plug-in on your piano that's inducing the gap. It may be something that isn't integral to recording your piano.

If you have any unused extra audio takes, Cakewalk streams them from the disk whether they are muted or active, so delete or archive any audio takes that aren't being used.

If you want to tune your system, there is currently an excellent thread on optimizing Windows 10 for DAW work here in this forum.

[Michael Fogarty]

thank you Eric. Yes, I turn off all the FX as you mentioned. Never heard about the extra audio takes, though mine are archived. I probably just need a stronger computer.