Viewing the latency of a plugin or Live device
Certain plugins and Live devices can introduce latency depending on their algorithms or processes. Live's Delay Compensation compensates for latency by keeping every track in your Set in time with each other. The actual amount of latency depends on the sample rate settings, so for the purposes of this article, we will assume a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz and list latency in both samples and milliseconds.
Note: To remove the latency that a device causes in a Set, you need to either Freeze and Flatten the track, or delete the device entirely. Simply deactivating a device doesn't remove its latency.
How to view the latency of a device
Hover your cursor over the device title bar in Device View to display the latency in the status bar. The device latency is shown both in samples and in milliseconds.
Note: If Delay Compensation is not active under the Options menu, then it won't be possible to display the latency of a device.
Live Instruments which introduce latency
Collision: due to the built-in limiter, this instrument introduces a latency of 64 samples (ca 1.5 ms).
External Instrument: Once the 'MIDI To' is set, latency is introduced. The latency is the same as that currently displayed in the 'Overall Latency' field in Live's audio preferences.
Lookahead
While Live's dynamics processors do not introduce latency as such, they do if the lookahead feature is enabled. Because lookahead introduces a negative delay for the side chain signal triggering the gain reduction, Compressor, Gate and Limiter add an amount of latency equal to the amount of lookahead.
Glue Compressor: this device does not come with a lookahead feature, but it introduces 32 samples latency (0.73 ms) when in Oversampling mode.
Other Live Effects which introduce latency
- Corpus: due to the built-in limiter, 64 samples (ca 1.5 ms).
- Dynamic Tube: 4 samples (0.091 ms), in Hi-Quality mode only.
- Erosion: 240 samples (5 ms)
- Spectral Time: 1280 samples (29 ms)
- Spectral Resonator: 1536 samples (32 ms)
- Auto Shift: 1536 samples (32 ms) Live-mode disabled.
- EQ Eight: 16 samples (0.36 ms) in Oversampling mode only.
- Overdrive: 5 samples (0.113 ms)
- Redux: 64 samples (1.3 ms)
- Reverb: 8 samples (0.18 ms)
- Vinyl Distortion: 144 samples (3 ms)
- Gate: 72 samples (1.5 ms)
- Limiter: 128 Samples (2.7 ms)
- Saturator: 4 samples (0.091 ms) in Hi-Quality mode only.
- External Audio Effect: The latency is the same as that currently displayed in the 'Overall Latency' field in Live's audio preferences.