[BLANK_AUDIO]. As you can imagine, it's pretty difficult for a computer to send out all those samples exactly in time, to reproduce the audio, in the digital to analog conversion process. When we're outputting to the speakers. The computer has to be incredibly accurate, right? every 44,100th of a second, it has to send out two 16 bit words, perfectly in time, over and over and over. It's actually quite a complex task. Luckily, our computers can process billions of things per second. So it seems like it wouldn't be that big a deal. But the computer processor is actually doing many other things at the same time. It's you know putting graphics on the screen, checking your e-mail, looking to the internet port, getting audio from something else, processing reverb and compressions, doing a lot of things at once. So, what it needs to do is collect kind of a queue of samples, that it can be ready to throw out. to the digital to analog converter at any point, and that way you can you can fill that queue with with some samples, go check the graphics, go back to that queue and throw some more samples out to the DA converter. And that queue, that that kind of buffer of of samples is called the buffer. And one of the things you're going to have to set up no matter what DAW you're dealing with is the buffer size, how large that audio buffer is. And it's a necessary thing, but it does provide, kind of, a trade off. In that, if you have a larger buffer size, you'll be able to use more plugins, more software synthesizers. and the computer can kind of run a little more efficiently. But, there'll be a delay when you're recording. And that's a really big concern. We talked earlier about the need to use a direct box and an amplifier when you're recording bass or guitar. Just because of this delay. There'll always be a delay when you're monitoring or listening through the computer, because there has to be that buffer. So, setting that buffer becomes really important thing, and something you're always going to do. And you're going to have to be very aware of it. And the general concept is that the lower the buffer size, the less the latency or the less the delay. But, also, the less plugins and instruments you can use. The higher the buffer size, the more the latency and the *more* plugins you can use. So, what we tend to say, is during the production, the recording or the tracking of the instruments, we like to have the buffer size quite low. And, I would say, for a low end, around 128 samples is fine. and then, during the mixing and editing process, you can turn that up quite a bit, maybe to 1024. You notice these numbers? They sound familiar, don't they? In that, they are perfect powers of two, right? 128 is two to the seventh power. 1024 is two to the tenth power. So we see that these numbers show up in more places than the digital audio properties. We're going to see these kind of powers of two all over the place. You can kind of think of it as the computer having only two fingers. And having to do powers of that. Like we have everything we based on powers of ten. There's no real reason for that, except that we have ten fingers. Well, the computer has two fingers, so everything is based on powers of two. So again, to recap, you're always going to have to set your buffer size and you're going to set it low, around 128, when recording, which we also call tracking, and then you're going to set it higher, when editing and mixing. And you don't have to just turn it up right when you start editing, and mixing. You'll just wait, and until the computer starts complaining. Eventually, it'll, it'll kind of start glitching, and kind of not be able to compute that audio in time. It'll get errors, and it'll just kind of have trouble, and once you get to that point, that's when you start increasing the buffer size. Now you will encounter problems with this that are not easy to fix. And one of the most common ones is what happens when you've brought in all software instruments and you have all these effects, but you need to record something more. So you have this issue where you have a high buffer size because you have all these plugins but you need to record something else and you have this latency you're dealing with. The solution there is nearly always to record things down to audio. You want to remember that the computer has trouble processing plug-ins and soft synths in real time. So if you can reduce the number of plug-ins and soft synths you're actually processing through, you'll be able to reduce that buffer size. So if you have lots of tracks that are running at once. If you can record them down to audio and then playback just the record audio, you can then bring down the buffer size. There are many features in a DAW to do this automatically. Things called freezing or freezing a track is just that process. The computer records the track to audio which it plays back in the background. You hardly notice that it's happening. But it reduces the CPU strain, dramatically. And then you can use a low buffer size. I would like to relate buffer size to the principles of digital audio. And remember that the buffer size is a collection of individual samples. And the amount of delay it imposes will be related to your sampling rate. If I have a sampling rate of 48,000 hertz, that means I have 48,000 samples per second. And then I have a buffer size of 128 samples. That's going to give me a delay of 0.002 seconds or two milliseconds. That's a tiny delay and will not be noticed by the players. So it's fine to record through. And find, find setting to have when you're recording. If I have a buffer size set to 1024, though, that's going to give me a delay of 21.3 milliseconds, which will absolutely be noticed by the player and it will be hard to really groove with that kind of delay. Now, so, we want to record the low buffer size and we find that software companies are always at the edge of what computers are capable of. So to record at a low buffer size with the sufficient plug ins. It's really going to require that you have a high quality computer with high CPU speed and sufficient RAM. So really consider if you're going to work with music production. You're going to need a very high quality computer. Or you're going to have to really pay attention to these preferences and be adjusting them as you go through the production process.