Adjusting player latency

If you’re using Soundslice with external audio output — such as Bluetooth speakers or an overhead projector — you might experience latency, a slight delay between when Soundslice plays audio and when you actually hear it.

Latency is an unfortunate fact of life for certain speaker setups, and it’s especially annoying for a tool like Soundslice where it’s important for sound and visuals to line up.

Fortunately, our player lets you set your latency to compensate for this — hence ensuring sound and visuals are indeed aligned nicely.

How to adjust latency

When viewing a slice, open the settings panel via the button at lower right of the player. Look for the “Audio latency” section, and click it to open it:

By default, latency is set to zero. Move the slider rightward to increase the latency value. You’ll see the number increase at right.

You can also type in an exact number instead of using the slider. This number represents the latency in milliseconds.

Changes are reflected immediately, so feel free to tweak this during playback.

Practical matters

In our real-world testing, we’ve found that latency is all over the map:

• Different web browsers have different latency, even when viewing the same slice.
• Different types of recordings (e.g., YouTube videos vs. non-YouTube videos vs. MP3s) have different latency, even within the same web browser.

As much as we’d like to implement latency setting as a “set it and forget it” feature, we haven’t done so because of this variability and inconsistency. So each time you load a slice, you’ll need to set the latency anew.

If you use Soundslice in a high-latency situation and have ideas on how to improve this, we’re very interested to hear from you! Please contact us and let us know your thoughts.