Low Latency Monitoring in Studio

[Emi]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Thin Ice is referring to the dual IO buffer architecture Pro Tools has had since Pro Tools 11, and that dual buffer behavior is all "automatic". If an audio path is in the "high latency" domain it's using the large disk playback buffer size that is 1024 or 2048 samples depending on sample rate, if it's in the "low latency" domain, i.e. is feeding a real time monitoring signal then it's using the IO Buffer size you set in the playback engine. This can be seen at times with the very low CPU overhead/good plugin processing if you don't have any tracks record armed or in input monitoring and no aux tracks feeding to a monitoring path. Then you can change IO BufferSize and it won't make any difference, but enable input monitoring on some tracks and stuff can behave very differently. But many sessions are not set up clean like that, especially not with aux tracks, so you may have low-latency domain stuff being used. This stuff was discussed on DUC a lot, oh a decade ago or so when it was implemented in Pro Tools 11.

All changing the IO buffer size lets you do is set the buffer size for paths where Pro Tools decides to use that, otherwise it's using the large "disk IO" buffer size.

Ok, I’m a little lost here. I didn’t know pro tools had a dual io buffer size architecture. Can you direct me to some info. Thanks