Which DAWs have dual buffers?

Well the MOTU rep who does Drew's job (way better than Drew of course) on GS basically said that they are moving away from AVB on the 828 (duh, they already did) but that they plan to continue expanding their pro-line AVB offerings.

I'm in wait and see on that though. I'm sure that's their intent. But it's been many years since they've released anything for the AVB line.

However, (man, this is just like what you're saying with Apollo) it's also been many years since they've updated their pro lines at all. So the big turning point for me on MOTU will be when they release the next pro level upgrade will it support AVB. If not, that's the writing on the wall.

As it stands, MOTU AVB is a pretty insane cost/value prop.

When Waterfall and the rest of the new stuff like that was coming out it almost had me tempted to go back to Apollo (I'm a keyboard guy) and then I saw... wait, huh? Big whiff on that UAD.

Untenable for ME. I should have been more clear about that.

If we were just talking about using UA plugins for tracking, then yeah, I may not care as much whether the quality of some of the plugins I'm using during tracking are top quality, because I'd theoretically be using something else during mixing to replace them. And a lot of those UAD DSP-only plugins are pretty old and bested by other plugins these days, so I would be looking to replace them in that scenario .

However, the appeal for me with Luna/Apollos was the auto DSP switching. Mixing is tracking. Tracking is mixing. It's the same plugin for both scenarios. You fluidly move between tracking and mixing, and start shaping, using the same plugins from start to finish, provided you use those particular plugins which UA has made available in both DSP and native format. Great workflow.

And, yes, this will continue to work for me for now. But what I don't want to happen is to be in the same boat as AAX plugins are now, where development is dead. I don't want to stick with a system where no further development is going to happen. I don't think anyone would argue that the AAX plugins available today can generally compete with the latest generation of plugins. AAX stopped advancing years ago.

So, for the same reason that people mixing natively now wouldn't want to be stuck using only old native plugins, five years from now I don't want to be stuck using old UAD DSP plugins which stopped advancing five or more years ago. We're all always looking around for plugins which have raised the bar to another level. This is no different.

Maybe I'm a bit of an edge case. I don't know. But for how I wanted to work, which is why I went to Luna, this new Apollo release was a clear line in the sand that things had changed. I don't trust UA at all at this point, and I'm not terribly interested in sticking around to see what other promises they might break or what other policies they might change mid stream.

There is some misunderstanding about how DAWs and buffering work in low latency.

S1, Logic, and Cubase all utilize hybrid buffers, but each does it differently.

While hardware does control buffer size, DAWs manage this by pre-processing unarmed tracks to align with armed/monitored tracks and therefore filling the buffer at the lowest latency.

Additionally, both S1 and Cubase offer an option to constrain delay compensation (known as Z monitoring in S1), which disables high-latency plugins during recording. Giving you the lowest latency monitoring path possible.

In these scenarios, busses with delay and reverb should not contribute any additional latency to the audio path. Cubase has a feature in the mixer to display the latency of each track in milliseconds so you can easily identify tracks with high latency.

Also, many are unaware that DSP plugins like those from Apollo add latency. For example, basic/older UAD plugins introduce 33-55 samples of latency, while the precision multiband plugin adds around 1500 samples.

What did you like better about S1 versus Cubase?

Yes, Cubase has a dual buffer.

I leave my buffers at 128 and Cubase takes care of the rest - I never touch them again no matter how big a mix gets.

I could probably run at 64 with my 24 core 13900K workstation but 128 covers me for everything and for tracking I use an analog monitoring mixer for true zero latency tracking.

So are you not using software monitoring during tracking? You mentioned that you use analog. I guess I'm confused.

Am I understanding you to say that, yes Cubase has dual buffers, but no you don't use them, because you use analog monitoring?

I don't think anyone was questioning that zero latency is actually truly zero latency though. I think we all know that it just means "low" latency. Though I would agree that it is an unfortunate use of the term, that could be confusing to sime people. But at least in this thread, I think it's clear that we are just talking about low latency.

As for dual buffering, there does still seem to be some confusion here about what that means. It's not just automatic disabling of certain plugins. There is more to it, from what I've seen. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, as I'll admit to the idea of dual buffers being something I'm just now starting explore in earnest. That said, from what I'm reading/watching about dual buffers, the input (recording) input is in fact a different faster path, because of a separate lower buffer, than the playback (if you set it up that way). This is why this approach has some benefit over one single buffer for everything. You're not asking all tracks to try to playback at a super low buffer, just those that are record enabled. The playback tracks can run at a slower, more stable buffer. Win, win.

Watch some videos on S1. Also, I have no reason to disbelieve what Gravesnumber has been saying on the subject. He uses it all the time.

www.soundonsound.com/techniques/studio-one-buffers-low-latency

Alright. I'm downloading the S1 demo now. We'll see how it goes.

1) has been update maybe? There is now a Cubase style listen bus.

2) definitely weird, I just record out to a new track

This is also my understanding of dual buffers.

I hadn't looked into Logic yet, but if that's how low latency mode actually works in Logic, I'm probably not interested in Logic, as long as S1 is an option.