Latency when triggering clips

[Edrec]

Just wondering if anyone else is successfully using Bitwig to trigger / play samples live using the clip launcher.. I’m getting quite extreme latency when triggering clips with the keyboard or midi (around 100ms or more depending on the size of my buffer) which is too much latency to accurately play samples when Launch Q is ‘OFF’ or set to 16th notes.

[Yokai]

Project latency is created by two things. One of them you have full control over. The other is something you cannot control too much.

So one source of latency is the size of the buffer on your audio interface. You set this size in the control panel for your audio interface itself. The more devices and synths, etc. you have in your Bitwig project, the larger the buffer size you'll need to prevent pops and crackles and sound glitches. Every DAW out there has to contend with this. Smaller projects can get away with smaller buffer sizes. Larger projects full of many tracks and many devices/plugins will need larger buffer sizes.

For example, in a 44100 sample rate project with a 512K buffer size, you'll have a base latency of 11.61 ms. You cannot remove this latency or reduce it except by reducing the buffer size even further. Which will cause audio glitches if you have a lot of stuff in your project (especially CPU-hungry synths).

The other source of latency are the various devices and plugins in your project. Some of them have to essentially create an internal look-ahead buffer to do their job. When they do this, they cause latency. You can see this per-device/plugin latency buildup on a track in Bitwig's Mixer view, if you enable the button that shows the insert chain for each track. Whichever track has the highest latency count is the total amount of latency you're suffering because of your plugins/devices. You can reduce the latency by getting rid of high-latency plugins. For example, you could Bounce a high-latency track and therefore flatten it all out to audio, and then deactivate the original track (or just delete it). This will remove all latency caused by the original track.

[SLiC]

Just wondering if anyone else is successfully using Bitwig to trigger / play samples live using the clip launcher.. I’m getting quite extreme latency when triggering clips with the keyboard or midi (around 100ms or more depending on the size of my buffer) which is too much latency to accurately play samples when Launch Q is ‘OFF’ or set to 16th notes.

What is your normal reported latency in bitwig? What sound are and driver are you using (AISO?)

[Edrec]

Hi @Yokia @SLiC thanks for your responses, I'm on a OSX and the buffer size is set by the host. I have the buffer in Bitwig set to 'Auto' which sets the buffer size automatically to 256 samples, this works out at 5.8ms.. my test project has no plugins.. just a completely blank project with a single sample loaded into a clip in the clip launcher. I've tried several sound cards and different buffer settings but this doesn't seem to make any difference.

With this set up if I trigger the clip using either by clicking the clips play button with the mouse or by attaching a MIDI note or keyboard key to the play button using mappings I get about 90ms to 150ms of latency between hitting the key and the clip being launched.

If I use the sampler plugin with the same sample or any other soft-synth I get the expected latency of around 5-10ms, no problem at all.. so this very high latency is only happening when launching clips in the clip launcher.

You can measure the total latency between a MIDI key-press and the sound by recording the sound in the room and measuring the delay between the physical click sound of the keypress and the resulting sound from the speaker.. the sampler or a soft-synth triggered by midi has little or no measurable latency when triggered this way, whereas the clip launcher has a quite audible flam between the key press and the sound..

Does anyone else get the same 'flam' when triggering clips with launch quantise set to 'OFF' or am I the only one with this problem?

The problem seems to only be with version 2 & 3.. version 1 doesn't suffer from this latency..

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

BW Studio v4.3.10

When triggering the same sample at the same time with a sampler and launching a clip - from stopped - launch q off. I'm measuring the clip starting about 60ms (~2880 samples @ 48khz) after the sampler. That's with my sound card set to a 128 sample buffer. Does anyone have a solution?

[pdxindy]

BW Studio v4.3.10

When triggering the same sample at the same time with a sampler and launching a clip - from stopped - launch q off. I'm measuring the clip starting about 60ms (~2880 samples @ 48000 khz) after the sampler. That's with my sound card set to a 128 sample buffer. Does anyone have a solution?

I suggest you send a request to Bitwig ( support@bitwig.com ) and ask if this is expected behavior or if there is an issue.

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

The problem seems to only be with version 2 & 3.. version 1 doesn't suffer from this latency..

While I'm waiting for a response from support, I can confirm that, BW v1 has no added latency when starting playback or triggering clips. Incidentally, neither does Ableton Live 10.

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

Update: Support say that clip launch latency is expected and the dev team have it on a list of things to improve on, but no immediate plans.