Why Not

[Martin Naef]

M@

Matt Picone wrote:
> When we record, as tracks stack up, buffer needs to be set high and 
> latency increases.
> 
> Why isn't it possible to have SOME tracks at low latencies, for 
> instance, the VST you're currently playing in realtime to record, or the 
> realtime monitoring of a guitar or vocal, while playback lags?

You always have to feed the sound hardware at the lowest latency, but 
there's nothing stopping a DAW developer to use different buffer sizes 
for tracks that are not "live". I know for sure that Samplitude does 
this. It's definitely not something that needs to be user-driven, the 
DAW can hide it nicely under the hood.

On the other hand, the additional overhead for managing different buffer 
sizes might not be worth it, as there are other aspects to consider such 
as automation (which tends to be per-buffer due to some legacy decisions 
in the VST standard). For some of my stuff, I did not detect significant 
performance changes with processing blocks larger than 64 samples. And 
the DAW still needs to meet the real-time criteria in any case.

Martin

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