No more delays & echoes during recording
Ever had to deal with echoes or delays in your headphones when recording? Or, that take you thought you recorded perfectly suddenly sounding very much out of time when you go to play it back?
A common problem! These issues are usually related to a problem with latency somewhere in your recording system. I’ve covered these issues, and various steps to troubleshoot them, in my All About Latency series.
Latency issues can really ruin your whole home recording experience, so it’s important for artists at all levels to know the basics of how this works.
Troubleshooting latency
Here’s your latency troubleshooting checklist, in the order that you should try to troubleshoot these types of problems:
Adjust the input/output audio buffers inside of your DAW. A video on how to do this in Ableton Live is available here, and in Logic Pro here. You want to try to get your round trip latency under 30 milliseconds; under 20 ms is best if your system can handle it.
Here’s what that menu option looks like, inside of the Logic Pro settings. As you change the I/O Buffer Size dialog box, you’ll see the Resulting Latency field increase or decrease.
Adjusting input/output audio buffers inside Logic Pro.
Assuming you have a decent quality computer and an interface purchased within the last 5 years, this should solve 80% of all problems with echoes and delays inside your recording system.
Fallback options
If that doesn’t work, you’ve still got options:
Try turning on low latency mode inside your DAW (if available).
Make sure that Plugin Delay Compensation is turned on inside your recording software. This is often on by default, when using most modern DAWs.
Try using direct monitoring to pipe the raw mic output directly into your ears while recording. This is usually a hardwired button that you can push on your interface. Make sure you turn monitoring off inside of your software when using direct monitoring, or you’ll hear an echo.
Checking your hardware
If that still doesn’t work, unfortunately you may need to upgrade your computer, or audio interface, or both.
Computers
Use a computer with an SSD and at least 16 GB of integrated RAM (or more). Even the cheapest used/refurbished Apple MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM should be more than sufficient for all basic 2-channel home recording tasks.
I like Apple computers for audio, because they’re well-supported over many years, the hardware lasts longer, and you generally don’t have to deal with annoying driver issues while you’re using them; they tend to just work when it comes to audio.
You don’t have to use Apple products, but I would stay away from using an ultra cheap computer like a ChromeBook for home recording: those just don’t have enough oomph for anything other than casual web browsing and word processing.
Interfaces
There’s many different options for affordable two-channel audio interfaces; check out my Home Studio Gear Guide for all of my recommended choices.
In general, you’ll want an interface no more than about 5 years old, that uses a modern connection format like USB-C.
Here’s the full series on latency for a deeper dive. I’d read through it in order, starting with Part 1.
