Pro Tools 2023.3 - Major delay compensation bug [PT-301415]

[noiseboyuk]

So... asking for a friend... if you never used the master fader at all, there's nothing to worry about re delay compensation in 2023.3?

[Fishbone]

Originally Posted by CurtisDouglas

Hey All,

SOOOO, I dove DEEEEP into this. A bit of a detailed back story, stay with me here!!!

Ok, so I mix records all day every day and as a result, I have to print stems of EVERY track in the song through the master fader. ALL major labels need full stems printed through the master for Atmos mixes/archival reasons. It takes FOREVER, but it has to be done. Of course we know that in other daws you can print multiple tracks through the master at the same time, but.... not in Pro Tools. This sucks big time because in ALL versions of Pro Tools before 2023.3 the master bus was NOT delay compensated. That means for every stem I printed, I also needed to re-import and line it back up to where its supposed to be (it was being delayed by the amount of samples being created by the plugins on the master fader). I thought this was ridiculous, many of my peers thought it was ridiculous, but we had to do it.

This brings me to 2023.3, when I updated I realized a few things immediately...

1- Sessions that were previously working completely fine in regards to delay compensation were now opening up with the red "DLY" under the counter. This was happening on all different types of tracks, Aux's, Master, Audio....

2 - I did a quick test and bounced a tune, I realized that the master bus was 100% being compensated now. YAY!!! This will save me so much time when printing stems, and let's be real here, when you export a song in any daw you should be able to import it and have it line up correctly. But.... BOOOOO, this is what is causing the strange behavior on all others tracks delay compensations.

So, heres where I'm at with this now. If you want 2023.3 to act like EVERY other version of Pro Tools ever you need to right click on the delay compensation of the master bus and click "Disable Plug-in Delay". Boom, you're now back to normal. If you want to have the master being delay compensated, leave it on.

While I definitely don't love that preference is on by default now (its clearly caused a number of people great confusion), I do LOVE that it is now an option.

Sorry for the long winded post, but it had to be done!!!

Just to let you guys know that today I got an e-mail from Avid team saying that this thread was flagged as a reference to investigate this bug.

I forgot that I’ve opened a ticket for this and was not following this thread, since it stoped to send me e-mail alerts for new posts.

In fact, I have found a workaround for my problem and it seems to be according to the findings posted by user CurtisDouglas at post #28.

In my problematic session, I was routing all summing busses directly to a master track where I've inserted a bunch of mastering plugins to get a Q&D master to a client. Since the ADC problem was caused by the plugins in the master track, I created an aux track to act like a mixbus fed by all summing buses, which is routed to a audio print track with no processing and then finally routed to the master track. In that configuration, I could get rid of all ADC red flags in the session, with all the tracks before the mixbus doing ADC fine as expected, and the red flag only appeared in the master track(where the mastering plugins are inserted), with no further consequences, since I can now just disable ADC in the master track alone and be happy again.

The conclusion: seems that the master tracks are now part of the ADC chain, which looks like it was not the case in previous versions.

Anyway, it seems that the ADC limit for the master tracks are way bellow the expected, as pointed out by other users in this thread.

Lets hope that Avid team can iron this out soon enough so we can get a fix for that problem in the next version.

Hope this help someone

See ya

[alexthemusicbloke]

Seems like there’s an elephant in the room here…

Why is there still a PDC limit in Pro Tools in 2023? It’s the most expensive DAW but the only one I encounter these issues with.

Reaper - no limit
Ableton - no limit
Logic - no limit

Seems kind of mad to me.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by alexthemusicbloke

Seems like there’s an elephant in the room here…

Why is there still a PDC limit in Pro Tools in 2023? It’s the most expensive DAW but the only one I encounter these issues with.

Reaper - no limit
Ableton - no limit
Logic - no limit

Seems kind of mad to me.

Elephant? There sure is an echo.

As has been answered many times on DUC in the past the limit comes from HDX hardware and Avid has decided to not break compatibility with HDX and/or has decided to not embarrass their flagship product by seeing to be be inferior to Pro Tools native.

[alexthemusicbloke]

That’s utterly ridiculous. We have a hybrid engine now and PDC does not need to be handled exclusively by hardware delay in the HDX domain. I’m not really sure Avid have made the right choice here judging by the number of other people who are encountering this problem (not just on this forum).

[BScout]

That's udderly ridiculous...

(Hybrid mix engine has very little to do with actual HDX workflows)

Still, delay comp limits don't have to be bound by the FPGA mixer of HDX.

[pascalcb]

Have the same problem but without any master fader in the session i´m trying to fix, I´m routing 8 stereo busses out to a summing mixer and coming back to PT with an Aux track, where I have a few plugins but without any latency..

I found out that in my case it was/is a sidechain latency problem, and what solved this was unchecking "compensate sidechains" under prefferences.. It solved the ADC issue but now my sidechain is not being compensated, just like in PT 2019 where the sessions where made.

[Paul Winstanley]

Does anyone know if this issue has been addressed in the 2023.6 release?

[basharar1]

Bug is still in 23.6, Avid has been busy adding marker tricks and colors, because that is what the marketing department needs. Video engine is still intel and super buggy.

[Darryl Ramm]

Sigh.

This *terrible horrible bug* has been fixed in 2023.6. It's documented in the release notes if you know the bug numbers (Avid you need to write more human readable release notes, because uh your customers are human and don't carry around bug numbers in their heads. And you don't provide an index of bug numbers to customers.).

Never mind this "bug" has a trivial work around, and is all so clearly described just a few posts prior in this thread.

Meanwhile well known/well reported hardware insert and LLM and ignore errors record latency and latency compensation bugs remain unfixed.... (yes they have work arounds as well, but still this crap has been going on for tool long).