A part you just recorded plays back slightly early or late against the rest of the song. It sits a hair ahead of the beat, or drags a little behind, even though it felt in time as you played it. Almost every time, this is latency, the small delay between a sound going into the computer and coming back out, and there is a short list of ordinary causes with sensible fixes. The idea is the same in any host, on Mac or Windows.
This is host-agnostic. Every DAW and video editor works the same way here; only the names differ, so check the wording in your own audio and recording settings as you go.
Because of latency, the small delay between a sound going into the computer and coming back out again. While you record, what you play travels in through your audio interface, gets processed in a buffer, and comes back out to your ears, and that round trip takes a few milliseconds. If you listen to yourself through the computer as you play, you hear your own part a little late, so you adjust your timing to make it feel right, and the take can land slightly ahead of or behind the beat. Heavy plugins can push a track out too, because some effects add a processing delay to the sound they pass on.
The usual causes, in the order they are worth checking, are these.
There are two different things this can be. If the whole take is shifted by the same small amount, that is latency, and delay compensation or a nudge will line it back up. If your playing simply wanders, rushing in one place and dragging in another, no setting will fix that; it is a performance to play again, not a delay to compensate. Latency shifts everything by the same amount, every time, so if the drift is even, treat it as latency.
Latency is the small delay between a sound going into the computer and coming back out again, measured in milliseconds. Your computer handles audio in small batches, called the buffer, and a bigger batch gives the machine more time to keep up but adds more delay. When you monitor your own playing through the computer, you hear yourself after that delay, which is why a high buffer can make you feel like you are lagging the beat and pull your timing off.
There are really two kinds of delay to keep apart, and they cause the problem in different ways.
This is the delay you can feel: play a note, and it comes back to your ears a moment later. It is set mostly by the buffer size, so a large buffer means more delay and a small buffer means less. It matters only while you are recording and monitoring through the computer, because that is when you are reacting to what you hear. For a fuller picture of the buffer and what a low one costs you, see why audio crackles and pops.
Some plugins need to delay the sound to do their job, so they hand it back a little later than they received it. Lookahead effects, such as a limiter that peeks at what is coming so it can react in time, are the common example. On its own this would push that track behind the rest, which is exactly what delay compensation is there to fix.
Delay compensation, usually called plug-in delay compensation or PDC, is a feature in your DAW that automatically lines your tracks back up so plugin latency does not push anything out of time. When a plugin reports that it delays the sound by a certain amount, the host holds every other track back by the same amount, so everything plays in sync even though one track took a detour through a slow effect. In most modern hosts it is on by default and you never have to think about it.
The catch is that it cannot fix everything. Delay compensation only knows about delays that are declared to it, and it only lines up playback, so a few situations still slip through.
So delay compensation quietly solves the plugin side of this for most people most of the time. The part it cannot solve is the delay you hear in your headphones while you are actually playing, which is where the fixes below come in.
Lower the buffer size while you record so the delay you hear stays small, raise it again while you mix, and where you can, monitor through your interface instead of the computer so you hear yourself with no delay at all. Those three habits solve most of it. After that, keep the recording track light, make sure delay compensation is on, and nudge a take into place if something still sits early or late.
Here is the order that works. Stop as soon as your takes land in time.
The table maps the most common causes to a fix.
| Cause | Fix |
|---|---|
| Whole take lands early or late after monitoring through the computer | Lower the buffer while recording, or monitor through the interface, then nudge the take into place |
| One track drifts out once a heavy plugin is on it | Check that plug-in delay compensation is on, and freeze or bounce the plugin if needed |
| A lookahead limiter or similar effect pushes a track back | Leave PDC on for playback, and take the effect off a live input while you record |
| External hardware in the chain arrives late | Set your host's hardware or record offset so the delay is measured and corrected |
| Clicks and dropouts when you drop the buffer to record | Raise the buffer one step until it is clean; see why audio crackles and pops |
| Timing wanders unevenly through the take | That is performance, not latency, so play it again rather than nudging |
Most of this page is about the delay between playing something and hearing it back. There is one place that delay does not exist: a sound made right where you are listening, with nothing to record on the way in.
Our instruments play in real time right in your browser, with nothing to install and no round trip latency to fight, so you can audition an idea and write a part the moment it lands. The Collection is three of them: ARGISH, SILT and REHEAT. It is a quick way to hear a part in time before you ever open a session.
When you do want them in a project, The Collection ships as AU, VST3, AAX and a standalone app on macOS, signed and notarized, and a VST3 on Windows, so it loads into whatever setup you already have.
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