Complete beginner question about latency

[Mike Ryko]

Hello, today was my first day ever trying to use a DAW and record some music (so please be patient!). I have Waveform 12 downloaded on a Windows 10 laptop. After a day of trial and error, I've run into a lot of problems with latency. I cannot believe that it can be so complicated to record different tracks and fear I must be doing something (extremely fundamental) wrong.
Is it REALLY the case that it can be so hard to record, say, vocals over a backing track MP3? Every time I try, all the vocals are completely out of time when played back. Ditto when I try using a MIDI keyboard.
From the manual it suggested running a feedback loop to fix this, but I must be doing something wrong - I get a message saying "Couldn't detect the test signal - This might be because the output isn't being correctly looped back or because the signal is too quiet or noisy". I don't know how to fix this.

As a work around, I've been cutting up the vocals and nudging each vocal phrase so that they're in time - but there must surely be a better solution! Any/all help and advice very gratefully received!

[cron]

Welcome to the forum and the world of audio production.

The quick answer is "Google ASIO drivers and latency." Everything is going to come back to that.

The slightly longer one is that Windows doesn't really care about audio latency in the way musicians do. Lower latency means trading CPU performance, and the possibility of audio dropouts if the latency is too low and the CPU can't keep the audio buffer filled up. Windows is biased more toward high latency/high reliability out of the box. Pro and semi-pro soundcards will come with ASIO drivers, a type of driver that essentially bypasses Windows' audio core entirely, enabling you to choose the latency/performance tradeoff yourself. I go with about 10 milliseconds (I don't do external recording), which is considered pretty high.

If you're just using a generic soundcard (or your motherboard's built-in audio) that doesn't have ASIO drivers available for it, there are generic solutions like ASIO4All that will help you get latency down. There may be other workarounds too (I'm not familiar with this loopback trick you mention.) I can't speak for the quality of the card/drivers, but I think Behringer make the cheapest options with (native) ASIO drivers at around the £30-£40 price point last time I looked, but that was years ago and I imagine inflation has taken its toll.

[nowgad]

Is there a similar delay, for example, in FL studio? Try different daws...

[Mike Ryko]

Thanks, Cron - I will try to download an ASIO driver
Nowgad - I have tried other daws - and I get similar delays in Mixpad.
Many thanks to both of you for your speedy response.

So are we saying everyone experiences these delays when recording multiple instruments and it's just part of using any DAW with a Windows computer? It seems such a fundamentally crippling feature - I find that hard to fathom!
My last experience of recording was 35 years ago using 4 and 8-track recorders with cassettes! For all the mind-blowing technological advances that digital augio workstations seem to offer - not being able to record different tracks that sync in time with previously recorded tracks seems an enormous step backwards. I still can't believe this is the case and I must have missed something very basic which I'm doing wrong.

[Mike Ryko]

UPATE - Cron, I installed an ASIO driver and that does indeed seem to have worked! Thank you so much!

[UnionS8]

Open "Audio Devices" in the Settings tab, select ASIO4All and hit Control panel. There will be a slider with the Buffer size (alternatively you can set the Audio buffer size directly in the Waveform's own drop-down menu next to it). Try to lower it as much as possible. This decreases the latency. You can go with the Buffer size as low as 64 samples if your computer is capable enough to handle it. You can also set the Sample rate zo 48 000 Hz which means, it will require more samples per second to be processed, which then means, the buffer will be calculated more often (than with let's say 44 100 Hz) and it leads to even lower latency. This particular setting means, you'll get 2.6 ms of latency in overall. But again. Your computer must be strong enough to handle it.
Also: it's common to record your track at these settings and then, when it comes to the mixing process and you're going to use more plugins, just rise the buffer size again. Because after that, your computer won't be quick enough to compute all the plugins within the 64 samples buffer size.

[UnionS8]

One more thing! In the ASIO4All Control Panel it's important to enable/disable only the ins and outs you're gonna need. If your soundcard handles more ins/outs and they're not necessary, just turn them off. And sure, if there are more Audio devices ion your computer, make sure to select the proper one.

[Mike Ryko]

Thank you! I'll try that.