Topic: Latency Free Hardware Inserts in Reaper
Im an avid RME fanboy. I simply cannot hide it. I've been on the RME train for over a decade.
It occurred to me that Ive been spending alot of my time phase aligning hardware inserts when I honestly did not have to.
RME's Delay reporting mechanism doesn't work. It never has. in hardware Loopbacks don't really help in all situations and I honestly needed a permanent solution.
The problem was in complex routing, I like to sprinkle hardware inserts between plugins, between other hardware inserts etc... Thing is, as far as I knew adding too many hardware inserts and plugins in a complex way would bring about delays and strange phasing issues.. Well, kiss those days good bye, I have a solution
This applies to Reaper, if your in another DAW, sorry I'm clueless.
So here's how its done,
The first thing we have to do is open reapers preferences (Options/Preferences)
Now find "recording" from the list on the left hand side (audio/recording)
Here is where we do something completely unintuitive, yet necessary for RME devices; UNCHECK USE DRIVER REPORTED LATENCY... set all of your manual offsets to 0.
Now, still inside of preferences on the list on the left find Track/Send Defaults (under project)
You will see a "record config" option. click on the chosen input and check "Preserve PDC delays monitoring in recorded items"
Apply and click OK
Select the track you wish to play around with and create an empty track underneath. Route your signal to that track
Now.. all you have to do is use the reainsert plugin on the empty track, bypass the hardware (physically in real life) and ping it once. Right click the record button (the red circle on the side of the track) and select "Record: Output / Latency Compensated"
Arm the track, press record and boom, No latency, regardless how many instances of hardware or software inserts you have. Reaper takes care of the Latency, you can rest easy knowing your material will be perfectly in phase.
Thats it, open as many hardware or software inserts as youd like, stack em as high as you want.. reaper will automatically compensate any and all delays.
This method works so well, you can NULL the original signal, all without entering a manual offset, independent of how many hardware and software inserts you have stacked on the track.
Once you've set it up once, it keeps working forever.
RME's latency reporting is either non existent or broken, idk. I was working through it for a long time, but I decided enough was enough. Spend some time trying everything I could think of until I did this..
Now i can mix and match hardware and software and not worry at all about latency. Its perfect!
