Which DAWs have dual buffers?

I was reading the Logic docs, and they are not very clear, like this: support.apple.com/en-gb/108295

Now I am reading the Logic forums and again there is a bunch of conflicting information so I guess its time try out my old friend Logic again and see for myself.

Yeah, I'm reading some things from Apple too, and similarly unsure what they are saying.

www.soundonsound.com/techniques/looking-after-logic

support.apple.com/fi-fi/guide/logicpro/lgcpbb81aca5/mac



This suggests that the dual buffer is a thing.

vi-control.net/community/threads/logic-pro-buffer-settings-doing-nothing-to-cpu-performance.89249/

And also from this same thread:

I agree with you. I Googled it and really couldn't find anything pertaining to what the latency is actually doing. For instance if we change the Buffer Size from 128 (my current setting) to 512, when you play your keyboard, there's noticeable latency, which is why I keep it at 128. I tried changing the Buffer Range from Small to Medium, and the Resulting Latency still reads 10.7 ms Roundtrip (5.3 ms Output), so clearly there's no difference there, so I'll leave it set to Medium.


My money is on Logic, in fact, having a dual buffer, but I'd still like something more concrete.

Yeah, this is one thing that worries me about Logic, from a support standpoint. As Apple is not a dedicated audio company, in the way that other DAW makers are, I do wonder how much I might even be able to trust that I'm getting good info from support, if/when I ever contact them to specifically discuss this exact sort of minutia. I mean, they might be able to wax ecstatic about new features in Safari, but what about buffer settings in Logic?

That said, Logic may end up being what I go with.

Dual buffers? Check
Plugin info sent out over MCU? Check
Way to open plugin GUIs without a mouse? Check
Hardware inserts via an I/O plugin? Check

Hmmm... I need to demo Logic

This is what I would be planning on using if I end up going with Logic.

www.logicprohelp.com/forums/topic/154488-plugsearch-v4-for-logic-pro-released-with-great-additions/

speakerfood.com/pages/plugsearch-4-product-page

Cubase has a great HW I/o plug-in, almost identical to S1

Low latency mode is a different concept and is being confused with hybrid buffers.



Dual buffer/hybrid buffer: From a Cubase perspective, “ASIO-guard/Dual buffer” utilizes the buffer size set on your sound card, for example, 128 samples. Cubase then adds a queue of preprocessed buffers before the audio interface. This means that once the current playback buffer is processed, Cubase can immediately use the next preprocessed buffer from the queue, only needing to process the live/armed track in real time, allowing Cubase to prioritize these real-time tracks and handle playback with any remaining CPU bandwidth.

In practice, this allows you to reduce the buffer size by one step before experiencing pops and crackles.


It also allows cubase to dedicate 1 thread to just those few armed tracks while processing the playback on other tracks. though Im sure most daws are doing something similar by now as well. 



 

Yeah, I don't see a presets drop down menu on the I/O plugin, so I was wondering if a work around would be just to set up multiple connections to the same I/O and piece of hardware, each with their own gain structure, and then label them accordingly. That way, you set up one gain structure for bass on your 1176, and call it 1176 Bass, and set up a different gain structure for vocals, and call it 1176 Vocals, and so on and so forth. And then you just pick the one you want when you go add it as a plugin in your insert.

So while I was reading about buffers, I found that Reaper supposedly does NOT render plugins that are on playback tracks at the same buffer settings as the armed "live" tracks. I read a few statements saying this but I could NOT find any authorized info on this and nobody expounded on that info so I have no idea what that means in terms of latency. I searched for over an hour and could not find any other info on it, so while a few different folks mentioned it, I can't believe it's actually true.

I DID find that someone has written a script for Reaper to emulate most of the methods that Cubase and S1 use for low latency, which is scanning plugs for latency and disabling those above 3ms automatically and so forth.

Another thing I've been wondering is that Reaper has automatic DPC compensation on plugins, so whatever is monitored is offset by the largest latency, so the timing disparity between long plugin latency and what you hear is already accounted for. Reaper is also probably the most sophisticated in how it handles multiple CPU cores, which is why it's the most efficient DAW available. IF they could just dedicate a few threads to doing high buffer settings for background plugins, I think it would be killer. I did notice in some testing that the Master channel is also part of DPC latency offset, so I disabled that for the master channel and it seemed to improve the overall monitoring latency of everything else.

I did some experiments where I would load high DPC plugins and see how many inputs I could set to record before it started to crackle. I found that Fabfilter pro MB would crackle with even one input armed at 128 samples when there are 40 tracks playing and it reported 1800 DPC. I loaded up Soothe and it reported 3000 DPC and did not crackle at all. Both reported somewhere between 2-5% CPU.

So it's probably not as simple as just making large buffers, some plugs have poor efficiency overall.

Yeah, I'm really surprised that Reaper doesn't already have a dual buffer setup. Reaper being Reaper, I would have thought they would have something like this implemented. I already have Reaper, so it would have been an easy transition.

I get that some plugins are more efficient than others, but the idea would be to just give all of your playback tracks as much room as you can to get processed and out of the way in a non-real time context, without impacting the low latency needs of record monitoring tracks.

In that context, you could just set a really large playback buffer, and even if you don't have a good grasp on which of your plugins aren't super efficient, it kind of wouldn't matter, provided that the playback buffer is sufficiently large enough to accommodate the processing without any dropouts.

I heard about dual buffers years ago, and the utility made sense to me at the time, but I never really spent enough time letting the true utility of dual buffers sink in. It's only now, after coming from a DSP system, that dual buffers really grabbed me as something that I wanted to make sure was a feature of whatever DAW I was transitioning to.

Functionally, dual buffers offer a lot of the same benefits of DSP low latency monitoring, which is why I think the concept is so attractive. You no longer have to compromise between low latency and CPU overload, which is really nice in a late stage overdub sort of scenario. That's a big deal, and means that I can monitor thru plugins at really low latency and without having to constantly worry about and manage my buffer, just like when I was on the Apollo, but without having to be locked into the UAD walled garden. It's kind of the best of both worlds, and if I had thought harder about dual buffers years ago when I first learned about them, I might not have ever even gone the Luna/Apollo route. Live and learn...

I'm going to be real curious to see how low I can crank my I/O buffer for low latency monitoring, now that I wouldn't have to worry about playback dropouts. I'm shooting for 2 ms or less. Fingers crossed. Gravesnumber's experience with S1, and achieving sub 2 ms latency, was very encouraging.

Also, I hear what you're saying about the DPC latency. That could be an interesting alternative way to effectively achieve the same thing in Reaper.

S1 seems to have the best implementation, with presets and the ability to add notes and a pic, but the Cubase version is plenty good for my needs. I just needed it to be a plugin format and show a name of my choosing in the insert slot. Check and check on both of those.

I WOULD have put up with the Logic version, where it just says I/O on every instance, but I would have been cursing it. I'm glad Cubase has plugin based HW inserts after all.