High latency on brand new MBP

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Level 1

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High latency on brand new MBP

Hi. I am brand new to Mac and Mainstage and got a MBP for the purpose of running Mainstage. (2015 13" MBP, 2.7 GHz i5, 8GB 1867 MHz DDR3, Iris Graphics 6100, 227GB/250GB free).

I opened Mainstage and immediately went to preferences to check out the latency and the LOWEST that I can get is 19.2ms roundtrip (16 samples, no I/O safety buffer, "less latency", 4 cores CPU usage). This seems pretty high to me since I don't even have a concert open, yet. I've got a couple weeks to decide whether this machine will work. I apologize if this is written somewhere else, but I did look and can't find anything specifically related to an "out-of-the-box" scenario.

Questions:

1. What latency would one expect out of the box on something like this?

2. Will an external audio interface drop my latency (and by how much)?

MainStage, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Nov 28, 2015 11:40 AM

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Answer 1

DaCaptain

Level 4

1,048 points

Dec 2, 2015 3:01 AM in response to Ck1ngH1m

#1: The latency doesn't depend on the concert, it's a property of the audio hardware. So it depends on the audio codec being built in, if you use the built-in audio. Roundtrip means: the time between the audio input and the audio output. If you use Mainstage as a synthesizer, only the output latency does apply, which is much lower.

#2: Indeed, 19.2 ms is pretty high for built-in audio. On one of my machines, which is a bit bigger than yours, I see 4.8ms roundtrip, 2.7 ms output latency, which is acceptable. Please make sure, that you use "Built-in microphone" as audio input and "Built-in Output" as audio output. If you use System setting, you need to check with Audio-MIDI-Setup, what kind of hard ware is used. Maybe it's the Auto Aggregate Device, which has a higher latency.

#3: Try an external interface, which might make sense anyway. RME has a good track record, in terms of driver quality and low latency. The focusrite Saffire, which is class compliant, is a good choice as well, it's inexpensive and doesn't require driver installation.

So, to answer your questions:

19.2 ms is too high, an external interface can result in lower latencies.

Best,

DaCaptain

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