Next up in the latency/jitter testing is Waveform!

If you don’t understand what this is, please read the introduction post (This article is being updated if/when changes are made!).

Other parts in this series:

• Daw v Daw 7.2 update, again...
• Pro Tools
• FLStudio
• Live
• Bitwig
• Mixbus
• Ardour
• DP
• Logic
• Reaper
• Cubase
• Studio One
• Conclusions

Contents

• Introduction
• 64 sample buffer
  • 64 sample buffer
• 256 sample buffer
  • 256 sample buffer
• 1024 sample buffer
  • 1024 sample buffer
• Data
• Conclusion
• Meta

Introduction

Read the introduction post. I have updated this post since it was originally published.

For Waveform I used Multisampler.

Reminder, don’t trust dweebs on the internet. Do the tests yourself, or at least double check my data.

64 sample buffer

Reported Latency

• Total - N/A

64 sample buffer

256 sample buffer

Reported Latency

• Total - N/A

256 sample buffer

1024 sample buffer

Reported Latency

• Total - N/A

1024 sample buffer

Data

Here is a csv of all the data, including the config files used to plot it using deltafinder.

Waveform data

Conclusion

• Waveform has 1 buffer’s worth of jitter.
• Waveform has the lowest latency of any DAW. None of my tests went above 5ms.
  • Lowest I saw was around 3.5ms, but this was not captured in my 3 random tests.
• This seems to indicate that my previous thoughts of certain other DAWs having minimum latency are incorrect!
  • I will be covering this in the conclusion post.
  • I re-ran tests on Bitwig to make sure I have consistent results (i.e. a reboot or device reset didn’t change anything), and it is consistent.
  • It appears that the low-latency “jitter-free” DAWs are using an extra buffer of ~64 samples to buffer for MIDI timing offsets.

Of the DAWs with Jitter, Waveform has performed the best thusfar.

Meta

This post took:

• 1 hour to mess with Waveforms settings.
• 20 minutes to test.
• 25 minutes to write the article.