
As of Protools 7.4, automatic plug-in delay compensation remains an option only in Protools HD. This tip/trick covers how to manually compensate for plug-in delay in LE and MP. What is Plug-in Delay and Why Should I Care? When you insert a plug-in into your signal path, it takes some amount of CPU cycles in order to do its task. Sometimes, the algorithm is computationally intensive or requires a wide buffer of samples in order to do its job. In these cases, a plug-in may not be able to do all its work in "real time", meaning it will delay the re-introduction of the processed path until some future time. Usually, this is measured in either samples or milliseconds. This is known as Plug-in delay or plug-in latency. Many plug-ins do not introduce latency and do their processing in real time. However, some do. Should you care? If you're using a DAW that has PDC built into it (and most do), you don't care. If you're using Protools LE or MP (which don't have it), then you might. Usually if a delay is short (50 samples or less), the delay that is introduced is very short ( delay = (samples_delayed / sample_rate) * 1000 ). Let's say I've got a plug-in that's delaying my path by 700 samples and I'm using a 44100 sample rate. The delay of this would be: delay (ms) = ( 700 / 44100 ) * 1000 or 15.87ms Does it matter? .. depends on the track or the aux path. If the path is going to a delay or reverb as a processing element . then the delay probably doesn't much matter. But .. if it's <b>...</b>
Pro Tools LE
Digidesign removes PDC