Delay compensation for Side Chain

[Virage Sonore]

Hi everybody,

I was working with an older version for the longest time and just bought a Mac Mini M1 for my company and a new licence of ProTools (cause mine gave access to a ProTools that is not compatible with Big Sur).

I opened a session that I was working on with the older version and to my surprise, a huge glitch appears. After running some test, I understood it came from the sidechain bus (from 3 tracks of people talking to a compressor for the music).
One of those voice track had an iZotope RX that made it "unable to compensate the latency" (on a brand new mac mini!!!!). This made the glitch whenever I was using it for side chain.
That never happened to me before, I just wonder why does it happen with a brand new mac with the brand new version of ProTools ??? When there was no problem on my 2011 macbook with an old version of protools........

Does anybody know what to do for that...? I mean, this is REALLY disappointing.....

Thanks

[BScout]

Because it is an M1 and those plugins are running in Rosetta2 (which takes up more resources.)
You can commit that plugin and then disable if you need to remove that over-the-limit latency.

[JFreak]

Hi, welcome to the community.

Hang in there! PT and iLok are still not Apple Silicon native, as told, and it also means everything else is running on Rosetta for quite a while. Once PT and iLok are native, I am guessing we will see many plugin updates in a short time.

[Virage Sonore]

Thanks for your answers. It explains it now..!
Now it's been almost a year the M1 chip is out, do we have any timeline about the native support of the M1 chip by ProTools ?

Have a great day :)

[JFreak]

No timeline, but obviously asap.

Avid just got video engine working (without hardware support) so next logical step would be Apple Silicon native PT software. Whether they can release it this year remains to be seen. May also be dependent of native iLok software. Both are still running on Rosetta.

[alexthemusicbloke]

This is a huge annoyance for me as well. It's basically because Pro Tools has a delay compensation limit. Ie, the PDC engine can't deal with more than a certain amount of samples of OVERALL latency in the project.

Totally absurd for a DAW in 2021 - especially the most expensive one on the market. No other DAW has this limitation. It has nothing to do with your computer or Rosetta...


Adding in delay compensation in side chains is a much needed feature and I'm really glad it's finally there, but it's now exacerbated this issue whereby certain plugins are basically un-usable in a mix setting due to the latency the add in to your mix, eventually pushing everything out of time. Two channels running side by side with lots of delay compensation (within PT's limit) can add together if you (for example) take a send from Channel A and use it to side chain a plugin in the top slot of channel B.

A workaround is to only use side chains on plugins which are right at the end of the chain, as the total latency of all the plugins before it won't be added on to the total delay length of the source track(s).


There are now a very short list of things which really wind me up about Pro Tools and this is right at the top of them as I'm hitting it on every single mix I do (I feel like I spend half my day freezing/unfreezing tracks to get around this).

[Virage Sonore]

I share your disappointment and frustration, Alex... I am really tempted to just quit ProTools for another DAW.