Latency Friend

Description

Say hi to Latency Friend - an efficient solution for troubleshooting latency issues during real-time monitoring sessions in Ableton Live.

Latency Friend is a dynamic, diagnostic track latency / PDC calculator. Load it anywhere into the set and press the pop-up window button. You will see a floating display containing a list of devices, their latencies, and the total latency; this is your definitive latency breakdown.

With Latency Friend, you can determine and make the compromises you need to make at a glance, rather than relying solely on Ableton's native display, and consigning yourself to a tedious device-by-device mouseover pilgrimage.

The device has:

* A live, per-track breakdown, following the selected track and recalculating instantly

* A synchronised two-column list: latencies (left), device names (right)

* Total device latency, audio-driver latency, and the grand total

* A green-to-red health indicator and prognosis, with general (!) guidelines on the performability of each latency profile

* Recursive capability, through nested racks and parallel chains

* Dynamic recalculation; updates are made as you add/remove devices, toggle on/off, mute/solo chains, or make in-device latency changes (such as the lookahead on a Limiter)

Plus three display toggles:

* Critical Path / All Chains — either show only the longest, latency-setting chain in a rack, or every device across all chains. Parallel chains in a rack don't add up; only the longest one sets the latency. Critical Path lists just that latency-determining chain (the real culprits); All Chains lists every device across every chain as a full inventory.

* Active Only / All — hide what's switched off, or list everything

* Latent Only / All — hide 0.00 ms devices, or show them all

Notes:

You must set the buffer size menu to match your actual buffer settings manually.

The device is built for live performers running heavy real-time effects. This intended use case assumes that the master delay compensation setting, Options > Delay Compensation, is set to Off.

The audio driver figure is calculated from pre-interface universals: buffer size and current sampling rate. It does not (and cannot) factor in your interface's own hardware round-trip.

The device adds some LOM query and CPU overhead. For heavy sets where this becomes an issue, consider it a temporary diagnostic tool and delete when done.