Audio Recording Delayed in Logic Pro – Solved

In a one-hour remote support session, Paul identifies why his clients’ audio recording was out of sync with other tracks in Logic and works out how to solve the problem.

I was recently contacted by a client who was having a problem with audio recording in Logic Pro. When he recorded into an audio track, the recorded audio would be a 1/16 note out of place with the other tracks and he couldn’t figure out why. We arranged a time to connect via WhatsApp Voice Chat and AnyDesk.

Once I was looking at my client’s screen, we set up a new audio track and he made a new test recording. When we zoomed into the tracks, it was very clear that there was a problem. The new audio region was clearly ahead of the previous recording.

We had a chat about my client’s setup and I estimated that the most likely reason for this, was a delay compensation issue caused by one of the plug-ins open in the project.

I had a scan through of Logic’s mixer and found some likely culprits in the Aux section.

I removed all the non-native plug-ins and my client and I ran a few recording tests. With the plug-ins removed, the audio recorded perfectly in time. We had found the problem. Now we needed to work out a solution.

Next, we added the plug-ins back into the project individually to find what difference each one made.

We found the delay issue was entirely caused by the Waves Clarity Vx Pro. As long as that plug-in was open in the project, the audio would be delayed when recording.

We ran a few more tests to see if we could stop the issue. We tried different options in Logic’s Delay Compensation settings and adjusted the parameters on the Clarity. We checked Wave’s website for help on the issue and looked through forums to see if anyone else had the same problem.

We found a table on the Waves site that showed the delay added by various plug-ins.

We ran another test and confirmed that 2048 was exactly the amount of delay.

I showed my client that we could manually compensate for this using Logic’s Recording Delay slider. However, this wasn’t a good idea as the recording delay feature would be active across all his projects and this was an issue caused by a single plug-in in a single project.

The best way for my client to work around this, would be to remove the Clarity from his project whilst he recorded new tracks. As a noise-remover, the Clarity wasn’t needed while recording, so my client was happy to only use the plug-in during the mixing stage.

My client was pleased that he now knew the reason for the audio delay problem and how to manage it.