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

[MixerGuy]

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!!!

thank you for this deep dive, and for figuring out this.

my work flow is 100% different (I never use a master fader) but glad to see your work helping others out.

for what it is worth, evidently my workflow is so different, with plugins that dont need a massive delay compensation, so in 2023-3 when i open up older sessions, i have no delay comp issues. all is still good.

also ... otherwise - 2023-3 seems very solid to me, and they fixed a lot of bugs i am finding.

[dankin]

Originally Posted by CurtisDouglas

Yes, I’m able to get 16000 samples of delay comp. With delay comp manually turned off on the master (it’s natural state on every other version of Pro Tools until now), sessions/delay compensation are working exactly as they have in the past.

Clearly the “bug” here has to do with the implementation of delay compensation on the master bus and how that interacts with the other tracks.

This seems a bit odd. I use an aux for my "mix buss", and my bounces/stems are always delay compensated, as long as I don't have a plugin on the mix buss that pushes it past the 16000 sample compensation limit.

[CurtisDouglas]

Originally Posted by dankin

This seems a bit odd. I use an aux for my "mix buss", and my bounces/stems are always delay compensated, as long as I don't have a plugin on the mix buss that pushes it past the 16000 sample compensation limit.

What seems odd? You said it yourself, you are using an AUX for the "mix bus" which is delay compensated. The master bus in pro tools, the actual track they call "master fader" is not/has not been delay compensated until 2023.3. That's literally the only difference.

[dankin]

Originally Posted by CurtisDouglas

What seems odd? You said it yourself, you are using an AUX for the "mix bus" which is delay compensated. The master bus in pro tools, the actual track they call "master fader" is not/has not been delay compensated until 2023.3. That's literally the only difference.

I use a "master fader" assigned to my aux. Also, when I'm in tracking mode, I just use a master fader with no aux involved. I often bounce stems out of tracking sessions to send to other people that are involved with the project, the stems always line up to the grid regardless of what's on the master fader, as long as it doesn't exceed the compensation limit. I literally just bounced some stems out of 2022.12 through a master fader that has 3224 samples of delay, and they line up perfectly to the original audio when reimported to the session.

[weezul]

Originally Posted by CurtisDouglas

Hey All,

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

Thank you for this. Just about to finish an album, and today doing last revisions. Would much rather disable Delay Comp on the master than revert down a version. Thx

[DarkandKurious]

Originally Posted by CurtisDouglas

What seems odd? You said it yourself, you are using an AUX for the "mix bus" which is delay compensated. The master bus in pro tools, the actual track they call "master fader" is not/has not been delay compensated until 2023.3. That's literally the only difference.

Thanks for digging through this, I discovered the same thing but couldn't verify it -so this is the first time the ADC has actually worked properly.

The strange thing is previously I could have 14000 samples of compensation for the mix, and then my master fader would have maybe 12000 samples of delay on top. The playback would all be correctly compensated to the master fader, but late by whatever the master fader went over by. But an offline bounce would reimport and spot to the correct spot for the audio (ie fully compensated).

I'm not 100% sure because I haven't done a definitive check, but it seems this behaviour is still true, it is just that the DLY now shows red when the master goes over the limit, but it's the same behaviour.

What would be great is the ability to set the amount of compensation, just like we can set the buffer, the cache, the sample rate etc. offsetting the tracks for a modern computer is trivial, even if it means excessive latency in plugins.

I want all my latency compensated for, all the time, every time. If we can have dynamic plugin allocation, we should be able to have dynamic delay compensation. One day...

[RobertDorn]

When it comes to automatic delay compensation, pro tools is the weakest daw in the market. Perhaps because it’s the only DAW in the market that is so thightly integrated with a DSP system. (On the other hand, LUNA, which also communicates with dedicated DSP, had everything delay compensation related fixed in v1.0.0)
Curious to see if AVID will ever be able to fix everything related to automatic delay compensation in Pro Tools. It’s not a small thing because timing is everything in music production and music mixing, both technically and artistically.

[Daviskenn]

With this delay compensation bug 2023.3 is completely unusable.

2022 Mac Studio with 32gb Ram

[Blues Bird]

Originally Posted by Daviskenn

With this delay compensation bug 2023.3 is completely unusable.

2022 Mac Studio with 32gb Ram

No, you are wrong. Just read the explanation further up in this thread.
It is easy: If you have to, just switch off the (newly) DC on the masterbus and you are golden.

Been there , done that.

[Daviskenn]

OK - I stand corrected. Apparently I'm not getting notifications on this thread because I hadn't read any of that.