I'm getting a very noticeable latency (a good second or so), but only when editing audio in the arrange view. I'm running an RME UCX at 44.1. Buffer size is at 96 samples. Midi is smooth and running at a nice low latency as you'd expect for 96. No high latency FX running at all, and it exhibits the same behaviour on an empty project. Is this normal? I'd be surprised if so... it's very cumbersome to edit audio with this level of lag. Literally every edit is heard a good second after it's made. Doing the same to a midi item running through vsti affects it pretty much instantly, as you'd expect, so I'm guessing it must be a setting I've clicked somewhere?
The gif shows the delay between when the item is muted to when it actually stops playing, and vice versa. Same thing if I move it, split and remove it, always that lag, but only when editing audio.
Latency is always a trade off. Lower latencies require more processing and higher latencies present more delay. As long as you don't get clicks and pops, low latency settings are generally preferred.
IMO there are quite a few defaults that don't make a lot of sense. I spent a couple hours with my sister the other night helping her configure them. I guess the devs have their reasons...
Out of interest, I see this is switched off as default - is there any downside to having this ticked the time?
Maybe not a great idea to disable the buffering completely, could just reduce the media buffering amount from the default 1200 milliseconds down to 200 milliseconds or something.
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Xenakios - thanks for this. For anyone else wondering - Xenakios's suggestion is the solution if you want ALL tracks media latency to be reduced, rather than just the selected one, which is actually what I'm after (although I didn't specify that clearly in my OP).
I'm wondering if anyone knows how low it's safe to take the media buffer? I get in close and edit drum loops by hand a lot, so I need that quick aural feedback when editing small looped sections. I'm running an i9 with plenty of ram, recording onto NVMe, so I'm assuming the disk speed/performance shouldn't be an issue. Setting it down to about 200, with prebuffer around 50% gives me a much lower, more manageable lag. But I'm wondering what will be affected if I take it lower - as far as I can tell, this is a separate buffering system to the typical soundcard asio buffer... Will this media buffer size affect FX performance like the asio buffer size, or is it purely related to disk performance/management? Or maybe it just affects take FX but not track FX? I don't see clarification of what this actually does in the manual.
I only experience this edit lag on other DAW's if path of the track I'm editing contains high latency plugins... but I'm also aware that Reaper is considered generally more efficient/stable at managing those kind of high latency plugins in big projects (and it's part of the reason I'm strongly considering moving over)... is this 'media buffer' just the trade off for increased stability?
If you want to educate yourself on what buffering is all about: .
Even with the best specs available, you can still bottleneck. This info pertains to all DAWs and devices.
As to your question, it's the same answer I gave before. You can lower that buffering size as much as you want, until you notice glitches. As the project grows and plugin count increases, you may find you need to increase it.
I've seen that video, thanks. I know what buffering is in the traditional DAW sense, I think you may have misunderstood. I'm asking if Reaper's 'media buffering' is the same basic function as typical soundcard buffering, the kind that is discussed in this video, and if not then what could potentially be negatively affected by lowering it.
For instance - typical soundcard buffering does NOT affect the time between hitting play and hearing the audio start and stop - however Reaper's 'media buffering' does.
Another example - typical soundcard buffering will not typically affect disk performance in a major way - whereas this 'media buffering' seems to be geared in some way towards that... So it is seems to be serving a different purpose, and doing something different internally.
I'm also given to understand that Reaper's anticipative FX feature, along with it's better multi-core utilisation (compared to other DAWs), can give a better chance at avoiding the exact type of bottleneck situation that this video describes... wherein one CPU core is overly stressed while others are not being utilised, so it makes perfect sense for me to query whether this 'media buffering' setting is related to that, and whether lowering it will affect those things. You're linking of this video about general soundcard buffering seems to imply that you think 'media buffering' is just an extension of the general soundcard buffer, doing the same thing just 'more'?
These all are doing different buffering and potentially working in different CPU threads in Reaper :
-The audio hardware (ASIO, WASAPI, CoreAudio) buffer. For live playing and record monitoring you want this buffer size as low as possible. This is the buffer what causes what people usually mean by "latency".
-Anticipative FX rendering. If you have a beefy system, you don't necessarily need a huge buffer size for this. The default 200 milliseconds is IMHO a bit too much for this because it causes FX parameter adjustments to be noticeably delayed and causes the plugin GUIs to be out of sync with the audio. It is still useful to have it on and at some moderate size like 50 milliseconds, to allow better multicore CPU usage.
-Media buffering. This is for avoiding that the other audio threads have to wait for disk I/O and the item/take audio processings. Not so crucial to have lots of this buffering these days when using SSD drives. Still a good idea to have some buffering but the default 1200 milliseconds is quite high and causes a really long delay for edits to the media items to become audible.
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Just disable it (0) and see if your Disks can handle it. I use 20ms for sentimental reasons. But a lag of one second has nothing to do with the media buffer, I think. Only time, I experience that kind of lag is when a Disk was in powersave state. You said, that in an empty Project there is a lag between press play and start? That could be a driver problem. BTW Windows or Mac?
But a lag of one second has nothing to do with the media buffer, I think.
Lags in audio file media item edits becoming audible absolutely has to do with the media buffering size. Try something like 2000 milliseconds there and it's blatantly obvious that edits like moving, splitting, item/take volume/mute adjustments etc take 2 seconds to become audible. (Of course the option to disable the buffering for selected tracks must not be active to get that behavior. Also the prebuffer percentage should be at 100% to get the longest lag.)
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Lags in audio file media item edits becoming audible absolutely has to do with the media buffering size. Try something like 2000 milliseconds there and it's blatantly obvious that edits like moving, splitting, item/take volume/mute adjustments etc take 2 seconds to become audible. (Of course the option to disable the buffering for selected tracks must not be active to get that behavior. Also the prebuffer percentage should be at 100% to get the longest lag.)
Yes - this was my finding also.
Thank you for your comprehensive answer regarding the different buffers in Reaper Xenakios - that's the info I was looking for.
I understood that it's a buffer so it's helping 'ease the strain' somewhere in the chain, I was just looking for a definitive answer as to exactly where. For all I knew this could be more of a legacy option from Reaper's early days when disk read/write speed was not at the general standard that it is now (which it turns out it kind of is, so I'm glad I checked).
Latency when editing audio in arrange view
Linear Mode
