JCjcelerier·Feb 14, 2025
I wrote a DAW (https://ossia.io) and a few dozen plugins (actually 150+ if I count the various small tests and examples in https://github.com/celtera/avendish) and I can assure you that most plug-ins don't add latency.
> There is no way eliminate CPU cycles being spent on whatever the plugin does.
that's not how DAW works, they don't output audio immediately anyways, everything is buffered at the driver level or just above so that there's always 1 or 2 buffers of delay between the input and the output.
There's no difference in terms of latency between putting one or 50 bitcrushers in series for instance because in the end the audio main loop looks like (in a very simplified way):
void process_soundcard_buffers(float** in, float** out, int samples) {
for(int i = 0; i < samples; i++) // samples would usually be the buffer size
Read the rest
you set in your audio config
out[0][0] = f(in[0][0]);
}
where f can be one distortion, or 50 distortions - what matters is that their processing time is < than the time you have to write the output and if so you'll always get the same fixed latency. (And if not so, you don't get delayed output, you get crackles because the soundcard will be reading its buffer whether you wrote something meaningful in it or not)