Buffer state in DAWs

[Mbira]

For some reason last night I had an idea while I was asleep and was lucid enough to put a reminder in my phone about it. 

For those of you that use DAWs you know this frustrating scenario:  I am constantly toggling back and forth between changing buffer settings for my soundcard in order to adjust latency.  Low buffer and low latency for when I am recording (but with more CPU usage and more potential for clicks, etc), and then bump the buffer back up when I'm mixing, etc. 

Could there be a way to have two buffers?  One that is always low latency that would only be active when a track is in record enable mode, and then you could have the high latency be much longer without issue.  It seems like it would be trivial to do the latency compensation with the different buffers so they line up during playback. 

Obviously people that are much smarter than me work on coding these DAWs all day every day, so I'm assuming this is something they have thought about.

 

[pucho812]

I get it, that could have possibilities. Like  you get to preset the size and then have a quick key command to toggle  it...  8)

 

[boji]

Samplitude I think tried to work this into their engine with "Track Speed".  However I tended to turn it off for sake of consistency, and instead learned to switch between program buffer presets with hotkeys. 

 

[Mbira]

The difference between toggling buffer with key commands and what I’m talking about is I’m imagining the DAW being intelligent enough to see a record enabled tracks and bring the latency down for that input while maintaining a large buffer for playing tracks and VST instruments, plugins, etc. you could still have like a one second delay from the time the record button is pushed and the buffer gets written to but then the DAW would do compensation when playing back. It could dynamically just looks at how many tracks are being record enabled and know how low the latency could be for those tracks.

With that said I mainly use Cubase and ableton-neither let you assign toggling buffer with a key command (on a Mac). What daws let you do that?

 

[zamproject]

Hello

MOTU, when using both interface and DAW (Digital Performer) offer monitoring modes options.
The hardware DSP monitoring routing is activated when a track is in Input or REC arm enabled

Best
Zam

 

[Mbira]

Hello

MOTU, when using both interface and DAW (Digital Performer) offer monitoring modes options.
The hardware DSP monitoring routing is activated when a track is in Input or REC arm enabled

Best
Zam

This sounds to me like what other interfaces call "zero latency monitoring" - is that the same, or does this also work with MIDI tracks with loaded soft instruments?

 

[zamproject]

This sounds to me like what other interfaces call "zero latency monitoring" - is that the same, or does this also work with MIDI tracks with loaded soft instruments?

Yes it is, the advantage being the transparent handling via the DAW mixer and no need to launch the dedicated software mixer for the HW setting
So not a solution for midi and VI.

Best
Zam

 

[Kingston]

Or just get a fast enough CPU and stop fiddling with yesteryear settings.

 

[pucho812]

With that said I mainly use Cubase and ableton-neither let you assign toggling buffer with a key command (on a Mac). What daws let you do that?

I don't believe there are any that let you do that. Would nice if they did. 

 

[Mbira]

Or just get a fast enough CPU and stop fiddling with yesteryear settings.

lol.  As my computers get more powerful, so the size of my templates increase.  So I'm always butting up against my computer.