My guitar recording is always early in the mix in ASIO

[Freshmint Melee]

Hello fellow Cakewalk users !
I'm new to DAWs and cakewalk is my first one, so my technical savviness isn't yet on point. I've been working for hours on end on Cakewalk for the past few weeks and I have a question I hope someone can answer, I'd be so grateful!

I'm using a Focurite Scarlett Solo 2nd gen as my USB interface, and I have been reading all I can on latency correction on this forum and on Youtube for two days and I have been testing all the different buffers to reduce the latency to a non-discernable one. No matter what I tamper with, my guitar recording remains early on the track and I have to manually slide it forward.



It definitely varies on my settings, I've been able to reduce it from 60ms when I started to 25ms with some tweaking but I can't close this last gap. I tested it by tapping with my hand on my guitar on beat with the metronome so that the measurements I make are the most reliable they can be.




Here are the last settings I tried :

Am I missing an option I should be tweaking ? Is this amount of latency the best I can do ? Is the 48000hz sampling rate the problem ? I'm kinda stumped  =/

Thanks in advance for the replies,
Fresh
 

[Glenn Stanton]

one option if your interface allows it, use direct monitoring and turn the echo off on the guitar track so you can listen to the other parts and hear your guitar in real time (presuming the 5.5ms round trip is still too much). if you're using FX on your guitar track while recording this can also cause the timing to be off depending on the FX and if you're using the PDC or not (which is the delay compensation to ensure all FX etc play at the same time - you can try to turn it off (press the PDC button).

[reginaldStjohn]

You can also measure your latency by routing the output of a track with a metronome or other transient type of signal out one of your interfaces outputs and looping it back to an input and record that input.  The time between the output track transient and when it gets recorded is the time you can enter into the "manual offset" in your 4th settings screenshot.

[Freshmint Melee]

25 minutes ago, Glenn Stanton said:

one option if your interface allows it, use direct monitoring and turn the echo off on the guitar track so you can listen to the other parts and hear your guitar in real time (presuming the 5.5ms round trip is still too much). if you're using FX on your guitar track while recording this can also cause the timing to be off depending on the FX and if you're using the PDC or not (which is the delay compensation to ensure all FX etc play at the same time - you can try to turn it off (press the PDC button).

Hi ! First and foremost, thanks for the reply, always good to see people well versed try and help the newbies ahah.

To give a bit of context, this was a clean new project to test out the earliness of the latency so there are no FX or plugins, this was only a single DI track. Also I think 2.5ms is definitely fine since that latency is probably humanly inaudible, at least the input monitoring audio sounds pretty instantaneous to me !
But I'm 25ms early when recording on tempo, not late. I'm pretty sure the playback sound and the metronome latency is to blame and not the recording, right ?

To answer you, my PDC is already off so it probably wouldn't make much of a difference anyways if I get the gist.

[Freshmint Melee]

2 minutes ago, reginaldStjohn said:

You can also measure your latency by routing the output of a track with a metronome or other transient type of signal out one of your interfaces outputs and looping it back to an input and record that input.  The time between the output track transient and when it gets recorded is the time you can enter into the "manual offset" in your 4th settings screenshot.

Wow man, this is a pretty neat trick, I hadn't thought of that workaround to test out latency.
So basically in the settings I just need to override my interface's ASIO reported latency and just make my own in manual offset right ?

[mettelus]

3 hours ago, Freshmint Melee said:

So basically in the settings I just need to override my interface's ASIO reported latency and just make my own in manual offset right ?

That is correct, and also will give you the best accuracy. Also bear in mind that a handful of plugins do not report latency properly, so if you do any recording after FX have been added (especially ones with a look-ahead buffer on them... a lot of mastering plugins have this) then that manual offset may change some depending on how complex the project is. Enabling the Global FX Bypass when tracking in that situation can help a lot, but it will also make the project sound different during that tracking phase (just disable the Global FX Bypass when you are done tracking).

[John Vere]

There’s something not right if you out of sync using a Focusrite interface! The timing should be dead on. The whole point of using interfaces that have proper ASIO drivers is that they always keep your  overdubs in sync because they report the latency to the DAW and the offset is adjusted accordingly. 
You should never have to manually adjust. 
Make sure you are actually using the latest driver from the Focusrite web site and nothing else. 
You should be able to test it’s accuracy using this

https://oblique-audio.com/rtl-utility.php

I’ve always found all Interfaces are with in a few samples of reported latency. 

Edited July 3, 2024 by John Vere

[msmcleod]

Check your Clock settings within Preferences->Project->Clock.   Your source should be set to "Audio" in order for it to use your Focusrite for timing:

[Freshmint Melee]

Thanks everyone for all the comments, great community !

After reading all of your suggestions, I can confidently say that nothing has completely done it for me. I continued to try different settings and the only thing that worked for me is to bypass the daw's input monitoring and set my usb interface to direct monitoring. I'll have to deal with white noise but it'll be fine for now.

I cannot for the life of me understand what is creating this native playback delay. I'm sure it's something completely trivial but I guess I'll find out eventually. I'll keep everything in mind but at least in the meantime I can record on beat without worry, ahah.
Cheers and keep on comping !
Fresh

Edited July 4, 2024 by Freshmint Melee

[David Baay]

I suggest you uncheck Use ASIO Reported Latency, leave the Manual Offset at 0, and try recording the metronome output via the loopback setup suggested by reginaldStjohn. The recorded click should be laid down approximately that 262 samples late (usually  a little more due to unreported hardware/firmware latencies). If it's still early, execute Reset Configuration File and try again.

If you can get the metronome recording late without compensation as expected, then you can re-enable automatic latency compensation plus or minus a Manual Offset to dial it in to the sample and then move on to recording your DI guitar. 

If you continue to see the metronome recorded early without any compensation applied, then I would have to think there's something on your system like ASIO4ALL or Steinberg's Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver interfering with Cakewalk's using the Focusrite driver exclusively.

Edited July 5, 2024 by David Baay

[mettelus]

11 hours ago, David Baay said:

If you can get the metronome recording late without compensation as expected, then you can re-enable automatic latency compensation plus or minus a Manual Offset to dial it in to the sample and then move on to recording your DI guitar. 

You can speed this part up with the actual recordings you are making too. If you record and are hitting early (be aware that this can be personal "timing" as well), as long as you are consistent, you can use the ASIO Reported Latency but also enter a Manual Offset (+/-) by how far you need to "nudge" audio (in samples) to get your recorded track to mate properly. Using the "metronome only" method takes you out of the loop, but the result you want needs to be tailored to how you are playing for that given situation (why it may change, depending how much coffee you have in you).