Sonar Workflow - Multisesson Tracking Loopback Latency

From Sonar

Sample Accurate Recording With Loop-back Latency

Introduction

Imagine you have a killer drummer playing along with a beat (an audio loop for example). You record their performance, and it sounds very tight while recording -- very tight timing. Now when we play both tracks back, it sounds OK, but there is this feeling that the groove is gone. It no longer sounds tight. I no longer feels "in the pocket" like it was when recording. This is a common problem with DAW hardware and software on computers, and is caused by incorrectly compensating for loop-back latency.

Loop-back latency is the time it takes for sound to play back out of a computer into the analog world and loop-back into the computer to be recorded again. This is a real and finite latency. If everything is perfect in the system, this loop-back latency is compensated for and the recorded track lines up perfectly with the playback track, giving us a sample accurate recording. That is to say that the loop-back latency still exists but the various tracks in the DAW software line up accurate to the sample. When the loop-back latency isn't perfectly compensated for we end up with a loop-back offset.

This problem is also often referred to as loop back delay, recording latency, recording offset, and recording timing delay.

List of Terms

• Multisession Tracking: recording a new instrument while playing along with a previously recorded instruments or sounds in a multitrack environment.
• Loop-back Latency: time delay caused by a the process of digital to analog and analog to digital conversions (DAC