Which DAW has lowest latency when tracking vocals? (Without plugins inserted)

[kvotchin]

I’ve found hardware to have considerably more impact on this (and honestly, a ton of plugins, or poor OS setup, way more so again).

That said, in my experience, one of the best DAWs for latency would have to be Reaper. Noticeably superior on that front to others I have tried (quite a few).

Not surprising, as that DAW runs “closer to the ground” overall (than most).


edit: Oh, just for tracking vocals, “raw”? Eh, never mind then. There shouldn’t be much difference, if any.

[echosystm]

"This is how all decent PCI/PCIE audio interfaces work. Class compliant FireWire sound cards work in a similar way on MacOS, for "free" in the sense that no vendor driver is required."
Not only is this bulllshit, there is no actual sense to the assertion.

T3 is known as a superset of USB-C. It is not exactly the same thing as that, and it is not a subset of it. It uses the Universal Serial Bus, I'ma call it USB.

As a point of empirical fact, I have never had latency this low for the things I do, not even remotely in the same ballpark. I don't know who benefits from such broad theoretical assertions. I'm actually seeing it asserted that all PCI type audio interfaces use the technology Presonus claims written 'from the ground up'? A rather extraordinary assertion.
Very low latency with Cubase (using virtual instruments heavily) under OSX is passing difficult, I've been at this since 2006. I'm not certain why, but this is the only thing that has sorted me in 15 yrs.

This is_not FW, the "free" status is entirely irrelevant, since for certain it uses proprietary drivers/is demonstrably not plug-and-play.

You should make sure you actually know what you are talking about, before calling peoples statements bullshit.

Thunderbolt 3 does not use "the universal serial bus". The Thunderbolt controller is connected to the CPU/PCH/GPU and provides 4 PCIE lanes and 8 DisplayPort lanes. The ThunderBolt controller can detect if a USB device is connected, at which point it switches over to functioning as a USB controller. The paper below, from Intel, explains how the PCIE/DP side works.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/t ... -brief.pdf

Your Presonus hardware operates over a PCIE connection, not a USB connection. If you open up the device tree on your computer, you will see that there is no USB controller before the Presonus hardware.

Presonus did not invent DMA. DMA has existed since the 80s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access

All PCI, PCIE and FireWire hardware can support DMA, if the manufacturer chooses to use it. I'm not aware of any PCI/PCIE/FireWire audio interfaces that don't use DMA, although I'm sure they do exist. Being able to use DMA is one of the biggest advantages of PCI/PCIE/FireWire, so not using it would be dumb.

The M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 is a PCI audio interface, it supports DMA and it is over 20 years old.

FYI, I'm a software engineer and I have experience working with DMA. None of this is rocket science. That doesn't make the product bad. I have found Presonus products to be excellent and I imagine their Thunderbolt products are no exception. However, I'm very much against this kind of misleading marketing nonsense.

[jancivil]

The reality is the interface is a brick unless the drivers are installed, and I had to bypass the usual security setting and tell the OS it's ok to, on top of which it has firmware updates and everything.

[jens]

You should make sure you actually know what you are talking about, before calling peoples statements bullshit.

Don't bother... she once quoted me when I criticized Reason about something specific, claiming it would work differently on her machine - which made me ask whether she was sure we would speak about the same thing. It then (for some reason probably not even known to her) quickly morphed (i.e. escalated) into some bizarre irrelevant and futile argument where she would try to lecture me about music-making while she made the wildest claims. Until at some point I finally realized she's a Cubase-user - and only a Cubase user. When I told her that she had misunderstood me and that I had been talking about Reason - not Cubase - all along, she basically ignored that and kept on spinning her alternative tale on musicianship (don't ask). I reiterated that she had misunderstood me. At no point did she even appear to aknowledge this. She basically seems to live in a parallel universe that's mostly disconnected to the one everybody else is living in.

[lpr]

FL Studio. More about your interface than DAW though.

[ghettosynth]

FL Studio. More about your interface than DAW though.

There's good reason for this though. The original FL Studio, Fruity Loops, implemented DMA technology so that your beats were planted directly in your memory.

[jancivil]

edit: Oh, just for tracking vocals, “raw”? Eh, never mind then. There shouldn’t be much difference, if any.

good edit. I caught that bit rather late myself

If I had to sell someone an interface based on its latency I know of one thing that has really worked for me, and it would be practically instantanous if all that had to happen was vocals recorded. And, apparently the situation of a slowish host may be improved by some hardware.

[tommyzai]

I'd love to know the latency comparison between DAWs.

[Tj Shredder]

All DAWs I know allow to define buffer sizes in their settings. The lowest size eats the most CPU, but the latency would be exactly the same for the same setting in any DAW. How small it can be might depends also on the audio interface. Its not per se DAW specific. But there are performance differences between DAWs, low latency settings might get one earlier into difficulties than the other. Most comparisons recommend Reaper in that regard…

[tehlord]

Mine is 9 inches, flacid or erect.