If your DAW crackles, stutters, or feels unplayable, buffer size is almost certainly the answer. It is the single most useful setting most producers never touch.
Your computer doesn't process audio one sample at a time — that would be hopelessly inefficient. It collects a batch of samples, processes them all, and passes them on. That batch is the buffer.
Buffer size is how many samples per batch: 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048.
Small buffer → less delay, more CPU pressure. The computer has less time to finish each batch, so a heavy plugin can cause it to miss the deadline — which you hear as a click, pop, or dropout.
Large buffer → more delay, less CPU pressure. The computer has plenty of time, so it never misses. But you wait longer to hear anything.
At 48kHz:
| Buffer | Approx. one-way delay |
|---|
| 64 | 1.3ms |
| 128 | 2.7ms |
| 256 | 5.3ms |
| 512 | 10.7ms |
| 1024 | 21.3ms |
(Round-trip is roughly double, plus converter and driver overhead.)
This is what experienced engineers actually do:
Recording: 128 samples. Low enough to play comfortably. Freeze or disable heavy plugins while tracking — you don't need the mastering chain running while you sing.
Mixing: 512 or 1024. There is no real-time performance happening, so latency is irrelevant, and the extra CPU headroom lets you run everything without dropouts.
Switching takes five seconds and solves most performance complaints.
Check these in order:
- Sample rate. 96kHz doubles the load of 48kHz for a benefit you probably can't hear.
- Plugin count. Convolution reverbs and oversampled saturators are expensive. Bus them rather than instancing per track.
- Disk speed. A mechanical drive will stutter on multitrack playback. An SSD is the cheapest fix.
- Power plan. Laptops throttle hard on battery. Plug in, set high performance.
- Background apps. A browser with 40 tabs competes for the same CPU.
- Freeze tracks. Bounce finished tracks to audio and disable their plugins.
Browser-based tools generally manage buffering automatically and expose less control. The equivalent actions are: close other tabs, use a wired audio interface rather than built-in sound, and use hardware direct monitoring when recording.
Related reading: browser audio latency explained, best DAW for a low-end PC, and sample rate and bit depth.
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