Unless you are a programmer, adding virtual instruments to a fairly large production is a nightmare.
Either you get monumental latency which makes it impossible to play, or you use the “low latency mode” and the mix goes totally wack and a lot of times you get some latency anyway on top of that.
It simply doesn’t cut it and personally I have had enough.
I’ve been using a Universal Audio soundcard for quite some time, which I love, since it has enabled me to record vocals, guitars and other acoustic elements without noticeable latency no matter how big a project I am working with. However it hasn’t fixed the latency problem with VI’s.
Now, with UA’s new daw LUNA, you can finally add Virtual Instruments to the list of no hassle recording. Even though it is currently just a really basic daw, missing a heap of features I have earlier been considering vital, I am thinking about switchingl Why? Because I am a keyboardist and I have felt way too long that all daws suck due to latency. There is simply no way to play along with the music and get a vibe. The takes are out of sync and basically sound like crap, so I’ve had to edit like h*ll to make it work instead of just playing, and the music of course suffers.
In my opinion Steinberg and all other daw makers in general need to totally re-consider how the daws work. There HAS to be a way to make it possible to play at least ONE virtual instrument without latency, or record ONE guitar/vocal without latency without messing up the whole mix. I don’t care if I would have to buy a DSP card or whatever, as long as it works and brings back the musicianship to the recording process or you will lose a whole bunch of instrumentalists to LUNA. Simply because it makes recording fun again.
What do you mean without latency? That’s not possible. There is always some latency.
what plugins are you running aside from the VSTis? if you have insert mix plugins anywhere in the project that have a high base latency, the entire project is going to compensate for that.
All you have to do, is hit the ‘Constrain Delay Compensation’ button which will deactivate these plugins. If you are losing sonic inspiration by losing the sound of the mix - then print a stereo mixdown to listen to while ‘Constrain Delay Compensation’ is activated, and or individually freeze the tracks that have latency.
Actually it is possible but requires direct monitoring and DSP plugins. LUNA is unique in that it’s free and is like ProTools HDX in that it combines the direct monitoring of the interface and throws it into the DAW so you can monitor without latency in the DAW. As soon as you put AU plugins on it though, it gets latency. However, Apollo interfaces have DSP chips and their own DSP plugins, similar to ProTools dsp plugins in ProTools HDX. They let you put their DSP plugins in the DAW and then you can monitor with no perceivable latency.
I’m still sticking with Cubase for now. Luna is too new and lacks too many features for now but I do think it has a lot of future potential. Enough so that Steinberg might end up doing some sort of UAD integration if LUNA becomes too popular. That is if UAD let them.
But Luna doesn’t have any DSP instruments yet and you’d need a lot of DSP chips to be able to do a full mix using DSP plugins.
I’m not sure what you mean by large production but I can do a full mix in Cubase and still add an instrument track at 18ms latency/512.
In saying that, I’m using an Apollo Twin most of the time these days anyway so it would be nice if Luna’s monitoring features were in Cubase rather than having to use the Console app when tracking which is annoying as I can’t use my control surface at all for setting the monitor mix. It would also be nice to save and recall a monitoring setup rather than having to reset levels. I have a UR816 in the other room here but I like the twin better as it has better DSP plugins, a talk back button and fits in a small space between my typing keyboard and control surfaces.
I will turn your mini rant into a feature request for you. Since you posted it in the feature request section.
Put Universal Audio’s no latency monitoring for both RAW audio and DSP processing from Luna into Cubase. That would be awesome.
You should consider changing the tile to something like that and re-wording the post or it will probably get deleted since it’s not a feature request.
