VE-PRO, Latency and ADC... need advice ;-)

Arceo · Post by **Arceo** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 11:00 am

Hi ya all,
just a simple question for VE-PRO seasoned users.
I can't, for the life of me, get the Auto Delay Compensation to work with VE-PRO. I mean, I'm running the plugin on my Mac on DP 7.22 and and a server on a PC and I thought that the plugin settings (regarding latency: 1buffer/2buffer/none) were to apply only to the latency of real time playing, since I supposed that ADC would have to deal with playback, whatever latency settings I choose the plugin to set up. But what I found is that during playback, the latency changes according to the plugin latency settings and even to DP Buffer Size. I must be doing something wrong because this is the behaviour I'm expecting from an external audio source (whose latency is determined by the Buffer Size set in DP) and not from a plug whose latency must be zeroed by ADC.
So I end up inserting in VE-PRO MIDI tracks a Time Shift plugin to realign the tracks in time. But this way, if I change for whatever reason the Buffer Size(i.e. Vocal or Gtr tracking), it's a real hassle to correct the Time Shift values of every VE-PRO MIDI tracks.
Does anybody had to deal with this problem and solved it?

Thanks in advance
Arceo

studioj · Post by **studioj** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:33 pm

Did You figure anything out yet? That is troublesome behavior. I'm just toying with DP in my spare time at this point, still in Logic for my work right now (which does not exhibit that behavior btw) but i am super impressed with what Dp7 has to offer. Havent tested VEP with it yet but I will in the coming days and report back.

Arceo · Post by **Arceo** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 11:55 pm

Hi studioj, still nothing here. I'm waiting for the VE-PRO users to chime in and share their experience. On the DP side (as a very early adopter of the "Unicorn", when there was no "Digital" in front of "Performer") I must say that you'll see that the deeper you get into DP features the more you'll get in love with this piece of software and its elegant design.
I'm waiting for your reports whenever you feel like doing it.
Thanks in advance
Arceo

Tim · Post by **Tim** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:41 am

I'll have to check this out. I only use Vienna (in VE) for strings, brass, and ww... and that stuff is always late anyway, so I never questioned it.
I'll try loading Kontakt in VE with some drums and check the timing.

Arceo · Post by **Arceo** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 5:31 am

I'll try loading Kontakt in VE with some drums and check the timing.

Thanks Tim, that's exactly what I did to test latency. Today I'm going to re-test it and post some "numerical" results covering the various combination of VE-PRO and DP Buffer Size latency settings.
BTW, I too am using VEP for orchestral sounds. But working on a cue, when I changed the Buffer Size from 256 (my average) to 64 to do some GTR tracking, it semed like the orchestra was in a hurry! That's why I checked with percussive sounds and find that latency was not (at list in my setup) "automatically compensated". So far I started to take notes of the Buffer Size number of the specific project I'm working on, so that I don't have to realign tracks to have them on time.

Well, thanks again guys for your help. Really appreciate it

Arceo

studioj · Post by **studioj** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 8:01 pm

Happy to say that testing VEP with DP7.22 at multiple buffer settings (64, 512, 1024) delivered identical timing when bouncing disk snares on quarter notes (loaded in Kontakt 4.1 64 bit VEP). Each hit had about 5 ticks of air between the beat and the transient of the snare. How do I get DP to tell me what this is in ms? I guess its around 5 ms but I'd like to know exactly. Whats the comparable feature in DP to selecting a range of time in PT and seeing the time selection up in the transport?

VEP plug buffer was set to NONE. I do partially recall that maybe the VEP plug HAS to be set to none in order to get delay comp to work properly..but its a little fuzzy. that could be your issue?

On a side note, my audio click wasn't working. not sure why that was, it was selected in the click prefs. I switched it to VEP MIDI, and the click timing was all over the place. any thoughts there? i don't remember that happening before.

hope this helps!

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 10:32 pm

studioj wrote:Happy to say that testing VEP with DP7.22 at multiple buffer settings (64, 512, 1024) delivered identical timing when bouncing disk snares on quarter notes (loaded in Kontakt 4.1 64 bit VEP). Each hit had about 5 ticks of air between the beat and the transient of the snare. How do I get DP to tell me what this is in ms?

Depends on your tempo and what each tick represents... are you using 480 per quarter note?
Also, make sure your snare sample doesn't have a little pre-transient "air" included in it!

Arceo · Post by **Arceo** » Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:59 am

Ok Guys,
here I'm with crazy results.
This is how I ran the tests:
Opened a song in DP 7.22
Added VE-PRO instruments and connected to an instance on a PC with Kontakt loaded with a kick sample.
Added a Kontakt instruments (internal) and loaded it with the very same sample Kick.
I recorded 2 measures of C3 at 127 velocity and duplicated it to assign them to the 2 instruments mentioned above.
I freezed separately the two MIDI tracks in order to verify if there were discrepancy betwen the Kontakt hosted in VE-PRO/PC and the one hosted internally.
I ran all the tests with the VE-PRO plugin set to "Latency:none".

First what I figured out from these tests is that PC Kontakt and internal Kontakt showed the same latency at the same Buffer Size as you can see in this picture:

VEP-Kontakt Comparision

Meaning that Kontakt hosted in VE-PRO is really treated as an internal instruments. Good for now!
But (and is a huge but) they reaveal to be strictly connected to the Buffer Size at which I freezed them. And, unespectetly, at 64 and 128 there is a higher latency than at 256/512/1024 (which seem to be consistent) as you can better focus in this picture:

VEP Buffer Comparision

With such confusing results I decided to run the same test with a Motu Instrument. So I added a "Model 12" and these are the results:

Model 12 Buffer Comparision

Which. in a certain way, confirm the results of the former two instruments. But it also imply that (at least in my set up and in my case) ADC is not working well. Otherwise I had to espect that no mettar the Buffer Size, the picture had to show the same attack for the samples.

So far I'm a little bit lost, I think I must check again my configurations to find out what I did wrong.

Any suggestion is welcome

Arceo

studioj · Post by **studioj** » Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:32 am

well that is interesting. I'll try the buffers between 64 and 512 and see what I get.

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