Do any of you use Bluetooth headphones while using n-Track? I just bought some nice Bluetooth headphones yesterday thinking they’d work the same as wired headphones I’ve been using and I can’t even use it with n-Track as there’s a significant delay when pressing a keyboard key and hearing it on the headphones.
Of course I will go back to my wired headphones for now, however, just wondering if it’s worth digging in to trying to figure out how to improve bluetooth headphone responsiveness or if I will hit a dead end.
The Bluetooth protocol adds a significant amount of latency. There is the AptX LL codec that aims at a low latency, which improves the situation a bit, but needs to be supported by both the headphones and the source device. However the “low latency” of AptX LL is intended for watching television and for telephony/video calls and gaming, not for realtime music playing, best case is 32 ms (not counting audio device and software buffering) which is already too much for live playing. We recommend using wired headphones whenever possible.
The challenge is that no modern devices have headphone jacks anymore and all I know to connect to the audio output is bluetooth, which has horrible latency. What alternatives do we have now? Is N-Track and other mobile-based DAW’s just going to fade away because one can’t listen in real-time anymore?