So, I’m fairly new to the whole music through the PC thing and I’m having trouble with latency. I guess I just don’t get the whole thing? I have my guitar going into a Scarlett 2i2, the Scarlet goes to my PC and that’s it. But when I try playing using the stand alone Archtype or using the plugin through Reaper (DAW) I get a horrible lag. When I try to use the metronome feature, I get all jumbled up because of the time difference. Can anybody help me? Thanks.
Try reducing the buffer size in your Scarlett driver.
You need to find the right buffer size for your setup as it is dependant on your PCs hardware.
The higher your buffer size the more latency you get. If you set your buffer size too low you will get sound artefacts due to the audio buffer running full.
I recommend reading some more about interface setup or watching a tutorial so you better understand the common pitfalls of the setup.
As the Focusrite Scarlett can run in native on windows (without) drivers, you should really use the optional ASIO drivers from Focusrite to reduce latency on PC.
Once you have installed the drivers on your machine, just select the “ASIO” drivers in the standalone Plug-in or Reaper audio settings.
Then you can reduce the “Audio buffer” in the settings to reduce the latency.
The less buffer you have, the less latency you will have, but the more power it requires from the computer.
So it’s a game of “trials and errors” until you find the buffer size that doesn’t make “click and pops” in the sound.
Whenever I set the device to the Scarlett ASIO driver, I don’t get any sound. The signal is making it to the program, but there isn’t any audio. I tried ASIO4All and I get sound, but no matter how high I set the buffer, I still get a lot of the “clicks and pops” you mentioned. And low I get the latency. I’m running an Alienware PC with a 9th Gen Core i7 and 32 gig of memory, so I’m pretty sure I should have enough power.
I feel like I’m missing something very basic, but I don’t know what.
You should not use Asio4All when you have a soundcard that have Asio Drivers.
Asio4all are «w generic Asio drivers » made to « transform » any basic pc internal soundcard to an ASIO one, to merge soundcards together and so, to be used in some DAW that handle only Asio drivers.
I don’t have a Scarlet anymore and I don’t do music on Windows too, but if I remember, in Asio, the Scarlet have the Outputs 1-2 as main output and Output 3-4 for the Headphones.
So be sure to plug your monitors on the back of the Scarlet, and if you’re using Headphones only, to use the 3/4 output for the Headphones in front.
(Or maybe you can activate direct monitoring with the Asio panel of the Focusrite).