SUMMERY:

In this tutorial I'm going to talk about Plug-in latency or Sample Latency in Pro Tools LE/Mpowered.

Plug-in Latency is something that happens when you put a plug-in on a track and it causes it to playback later in time than when it was actually recorded. Note that not all plug-ins cause latency and some plug-ins cause more latency than others. This is mainly only a problem when dealing with Multi-Mic sources like drums. If they are not time aligned perfectly then the track with delay on it will start to cause phasing problems.

Now there a few ways to do compensate for plug-in delay in Pro Tools Le/MPowered but the way I look to do it is really simple and it has also never failed me.



First things first. Take a look at the session screenshot below.




Everytime you apply a plug-in to a track you should ALWAYS check to see if it has caused a delay occurrence. The way to check this is to command click on the volume's display number on a track to toggle between the different display modes. Volume, Peak and Sample Delay. The number displayed is the sample delay that has occurred due to having the plug-in on the track. In the example on my screenshot it is 64. What you need to do is to get all your drum tracks (multi-mic) tracks to be the same amount. How do we do this?

Well, what we first need to do is find out which track has the longest delay occurrence. Once you have done this we are going to use the Time Adjuster Short Plug-in which will be under your delay plug-in menu. Put this plug-in on the Multi-Mic tracks that have a shorter delay or have no delay. Do not put it on the track that has the plug-in causing the delay.




Add in the difference into the plugin to make the delay amount up to the longest delay in your Multi-Tracks. When you do this you will see that it has now has the same Sample latency. Do the same for the rest of your multi-mic tracks to confirm that they all have the same sample delay latency of 64 (or whatever your plug-in's delay is) and that's it. So simple and only takes a minute or so to do.

When your dealing with sample latency as lower than 33 samples you don't really need to worry about putting a time adjuster plug-in on the rest of your non multi-mic tracks. However when your dealing with sample latency at around 33 or higher I recommend putting the time adjuster plug-in on those tracks as well to make sure everything stays in time as opposed to just worrying about phase issues.

For now, until Avid features Automatic Delay Compensation into LE this is the way I like to do things. I strongly recommend against nudging tracks. You can get easily lost doing this and forget what has been nudged and what hasn't. You can also throw the plug-in that is causing the delay on your other tracks and bypass them but if it's a plugin that uses a lot of resources, even when it's bypassed it can still use up a lot of cpu so I like the Time Adjuster plug-in.




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