Specifications

M-Powered Basics Guide
16
Controlling Delay (Latency) During Monitoring
Because Pro Tools M-Powered uses your com-
puter for all audio processing, playback, and re-
cording, there is a small amount of audio delay,
or latency, in the system.
Latency is most obvious when monitoring dur-
ing recording. You may hear this as a slight de-
lay between when you produce the sound and
when you hear the sound through the speakers
or headphones.
This amount of latency is related to the H/W
Buffer Size—the larger the buffer size the larger
the latency.
You can reduce the amount of monitoring la-
tency for Pro Tools systems by reducing the
H/W Buffer Size. However, even at the smallest
buffer size, there is still some latency. In addi-
tion, reducing the buffer size limits the number
of simultaneous audio tracks you can record
without encountering performance errors, and
reduces the number of plug-ins you can use.
While there may be times when you want a
larger buffer size, for the sake of higher track
counts with more plug-ins, you will generally
want a smaller buffer size when recording audio
that is monitored through your Pro Tools sys-
tem.
If you are monitoring the recording source with
an external mixer, before it is routed to
Pro Tools, you will not hear any latency.
To set the Hardware Buffer Size:
1 Choose Setups > Playback Engine.
2 Choose the number of samples from the H/W
Buffer Size pop-up menu.
3 Click OK.
Some M-Audio interfaces provide addi-
tional hardware monitoring options. Refer
to your M-Audio interface guide for details.
Computers with slower CPUs may not be
able to use the 128 buffer size without en-
countering performance errors.