What is an Audio Delay?
Audio Delay is a sound effect that plays back the audio after a certain time interval, creating echo or reverb. You’ll often hear this effect in music, broadcasts, or during live performances. You can use audio delays to my vocals sound fuller or mask the sound of slightly out-of-sync instruments when performing live.
What you need to know about audio delay:
- Delay time: The time gap between when the original sound was played and the delayed sound gets replayed.
- Types of delay:some text
- Simple delay: When a single sound is repeated after a set time.
- Multi-tap delay: When a sound is repeated multiple times at varying intervals.
- Ping-pong delay: Alternates the delay between left and right speakers for a spatial effect.
- Feedback control: This feature controls how often the delayed playback is “fed back” into the audio.
What's a good audio delay?
In music production, if you want a subtle echo, you’d want a 30-100 ms delay. A 500-1000 ms delay creates a prominent echo.
But when performing live, the delay is calculated based on the distance between the listeners and the speakers. Best practices call for adding 1 ms per foot of distance to prevent echo or feedback.
Why would you want audio delay?
Usually, lagging audio is a problem that needs fixing. But intentionally creating audio delays can be useful sometimes:
- In music production, audio delays add depth and spatial elements.
- When performing live, audio delays help sync sound between speakers at various distances for even sound distribution.
- During a broadcast or video production, if there’s a timing mismatch between video and audio files, you can add an audio delay to make sure they match.
How to sync audio and video (if audio delay is unintentional)
If your video and audio are out of sync, follow these steps:
- Import both audio and video files into a video editing software
- Look for peaks or claps to visually match the waveforms of the audio and video tracks
- Align the audio file with the video’s original audio track or sync them using markers, claps, or a slate.
- Mute or remove the lower-quality audio if you’re using an external audio source, leaving the synced audio active.
- Preview and adjust as needed before exporting the synced file.
Video editors like the one available in Riverside have features like constant frame rate to help all files remain in sync.
