[RWP] I'm having trouble with latency and reaper

[Indigo]

Hi,
Please tell us about your setup, what computer, what's its operating 
speed, what soundcard, how much ram, which operating system, are you on 
32 bit XP or 64 bit Windows 7?
What's the source of your piano track and what's the source of your drum 
track?
If you're using a hardware drum machine, or a VST plugIn; it might be 
introducing its own latency; or maybe the keyboard that's providing the 
piano has large latency, so it's actually recording later than the 
source of the drums.
Some USB sound cards or USB interfaces; or poorly-written USB drivers 
cause huge latency.
I love USB connection, and it provides low latency for me, but if your 
midi keyboard is connected to your computer by USB cable; you could try 
connecting with midi cables; or vice versa.

All that; and more factors; need to be considered.

Here are a few general guidelines to reduce latency:
You need to use asio drivers whenever possible.
For each hardware device, try to go to the manufacturer's website to 
download the latest drivers.
The RealTech sound chips built into most computers don't provide low 
enough latency.
Even running the asio4all driver, typical latencies of RealTech chips 
can be 20 milliseconds or more, so you get a delay in time from when you 
press a music keyboard key and hear the sound produced.
Try to get a professional-level sound card that'll get down to 5 
milliseconds latency or less.
Also, in Reaper's preferences/audio you can reduce the size of the audio 
buffer, which reduces latency.
By default the main buffer is set to something huge, like 1040 samples; 
which you can try reducing to 128 samples, maybe even 64 samples with a 
fast soundcard.
It requires experimentation to get the lowest possible latency.
Try 256 samples buffer size, if you hear no crackling noise or pops when 
playing back either a bunch of audio tracks or several VST plugs running 
simultaneously; then reduce the audio buffer size to 128 samples and 
listen for crackling or popping sounds when playing back a big project, 
and if it's still clear, try 64 samples.

If all else fails, and you still have too much latency; you can use 
Reaper's latency offset feature; where you subtract the latency time 
from the time it takes for audio and midi to go through the processing 
in your computer.
If your tracks are not lining up for some other cause, we need to figure 
out why.
You could nudge them back so they all start at the beginning of measure 
1, but it's better to learn why they aren't aligning.

Indi

On 5/27/2013 8:24 AM, kyle wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a problem with reaper. At least, i think its a problem with reaper. I can record all my tracks, and then go back to listen to them. for example, a drum track and piano track, and they are out of time. I know i've recorded them in time, and its starting to get a little old using wav files and mixing them down.
> Any help would be appriciated.
>
>
>
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