What is latency in music production?

Audio latency is one of the things that you will pay more and more attention to, once you're getting more skilled at music production.

Latency is the time delay it takes for your hardware and software equipment to read the sound signal that's being played, process it, and play it into your speakers.

To be more in-depth, when an audio signal is being played on any device, let's say microphone or guitar, for example, that sound is in analog form and being delivered into your system. Your software then converts it into a digital signal in order to be processed, and then changes it back into an analog, for it to be played into your speakers/monitors.

This whole process, having low processing power in your machine, not having the correct settings and tools optimized for lowest latency output, and a couple of other factors, are all potential reasons that might cause a high latency.

Having a better setup will of course help in reducing latency, but there are other things you can do to improve your latency.

One of the most important things you need to do if you want to start producing music is to get an audio interface. Buying an audio interface is going to be a lot more reliable than using the cheap sound card your pc or laptop has built-in. It also allows zero-latency recording, with its built-in "direct monitor" option. Just remember to update all of the drivers for it first.

Buffer size is the amount of time spent for processing the audio, measured in ms. Installing an audio driver like Asio will give you the option to increase or decrease your sample rate. Having a lower sample rate is going to improve your buffer size, but it's a lot more taxing on your system.
Use the lowest sample rate when you are recording, and set it to a higher rate when mixing, this will spend less of your computer's resources, and allow you to use more plugins without stutters and errors.

https://transverseaudio.com/tip/what-is-latency-in-music-production

 

For PC Parts this will save you time and possibly some $$ as well - https://pcpartpicker.com/

As far as audio interfaces go if you have the $$ check out - https://apogeedigital.com/
If your $$ is limited, but you want the BEST interface you can get - https://rme-audio.de/home.html

The audio interface is not something to skimp on. You can skimp on PC parts etc all day long, but when it comes to audio don't fuck around with tinker toys. Great hardware AND even better drivers are the two things that makes an interface reliable and useful. You don't get great computer audio unless BOTH of those aspects are top notch.

 

for noiseless setup, replace whatever components you've chosen with:

power supply - seasonic focus gx 650/750/1000 (according to your power draw)
case - be quiet pure base 500
cooler - silentiumpc fortis 5
gpu - sapphire pulse rx 7600/7700

these gpu and psu have a fan stop feature, which will stop its coolers during low usage. and this silentiumpc fortix 5 cooler scored as the quietest on the market right now. of course you pay with some degrees of temperature, but for your task its worth it.

as a motherboard i suggest b450 gaming plus max (good power components) and for cpu ryzen 5600

 

I would add this to your list also:
https://github.com/Roroca-1/amitxv-PC-Tuning

 

If money is no issues, get the best AM5 motherboard with the most NVME slots, an AMD 9900x, 64GB of ram, a few Samsung 980 SSDs for reach slot at the highest capacity you can afford. Use a 20TB spinning drive as an incremental backup disk.

If on a budget and want reliable performance, go with AM4, X570S chipset. Its still DDR4, but a stable platform at a decent price. The 5700G (integrated graphics) or the 5900x (needs dedicated GPU) are good processors for music.

 

A couple of other things I forgot to mention that may apply to your situation or it may not...

<IF> you ever intend to do any sort of video production on this new machine I would suggest getting a GPU and NOT rely on chipset GFX for video. For GPU I would suggest Nvidia 3000 or 4000 RTX series.

Get enough RAM. 64GB is nominal. More is always better. Also, get an adequate computer case to allow for future expansion (adding drives peripheral cards,etc...).

If the machine is to be used for production purposes, leave it disconnected from the internet.

Just FYI...

 

Last edited: Dec 12, 2024