Q: I've had Universal Audio's UAD-1 powered plug-in card in my Mac G4 for some time, with Logic 7 as my DAW. I recently added Pro Tools M-Powered to use for mixing and I'm having problems getting my audio tracks with UAD plug-ins to play in sync.

A: UAD powered plug-ins introduce latency for the simple reason that audio is bussed to the card to be processed, then sent to the track output. Most major DAWs, including Logic, deal with this issue for you with what is called automatic delay compensation. At present, Pro Tools LE and Pro Tools M-Powered don't support automatic plug-in delay compensation. Managing the latency caused by the plug-ins is done manually via the UAD Delay Comp plug-in, which is included with the UAD-1 card. The plug-in allows you to shift the timing of tracks without plug-ins to line up with the tracks that have UAD-1 plugs. All you have to do is insert a UAD delay comp plug on all audio tracks that DO NOT have a UAD-1 plug.

Here's a tricky little shortcut that allows you to set up easily: Create a template with two or more delay comp plugs on the last two or more inserts of every audio track in your session. As you're working and want to use plug-ins for processing, insert a UAD-1 plug-in in place of the Delay Comp plug. This is the easiest way to manage UAD-1 latency in an application that don't support automatic delay compensation.