Playback / Record Starting With 5 Seconds Lag

Dear Community,

I am having an annoying issue with Audacity: any operations relating to transport take about 5 seconds before actually kicking-in and carrying through with the task. Feels like pre-roll time… but I can’t recall this in the past, nor have I made any changes in the Settings.

I am not a regular Audacity user and for the life of it can’t figure out how to change this in the Preferences (or what have you) in order to make for an instant start of e.g. playback. If you have any advice on this behaviour please let me know, I will greatly appreciate it. This is driving me crazy.

Cheers,

J.

Please take a look at the pink panel at the top of the page and fill in the missing information. Also what type of Mac is it and what device are you using for playback?

Have a look at Audacity > Preferences… then the Recording section. Try setting Audio to Buffer to 100 milliseconds or lower (but not to zero).

Gale

Hi there,

Thanks for the swift reply.

The version installed is Audacity 2.0.6 running on a Mac Pro (OS X 10.8), using a Digi 003. Installation went via .dmg, dragging the Audacity folder to the Apps folder as whole, just as prescribed.

I just switched over to the Mac’s internal output for a test and alas, surprisingly things are just fine there (despite Audacity’s buffer settings still being set 100ms for the buffer / -130ms for latency correction). So it definitely is an issue caused by the 003.

Cheers,
J.

I’ve only used a Digi 003 on Windows, not Mac. It works great with their proprietary drivers and ProTools (also by Avid), but the standard Windows drivers were half crippled, making it difficult to use in any software other than their software.

Hi,

I have just done a simple restart of the 003 and Audacity and everything is working fine again and as expected.

@ steve: even with Pro Tools on a Mac and the correct drivers installed there are occasional hick-ups…that’s why I am sometimes resorting to Audacity for quick and straight forward tasks, avoiding having to wait 'til the cows come home for the plugin folder to be scanned and loaded at start-up of Pro Tools etc…

Anyway, the problem seems solved and I would like to thank the Audacity community for the fast and helpful responses. This is very much appreciated!

J.