Is there currently or has there ever been a version of Ardour where one was able to turn off any ‘plugin delay (latency) compensation’ (PDC)/‘automatic delay compensation’ (ADC), etc.?
I am aware that Ardour has included the feature of compensating for plugin-latency on tracks (-tracks only-) for like 10+years.
But again, is there a way to turn this function off?
(I am really wanting to manage delays/compensation myself, manually (-with the simple help of other plugins like Voxengo’s “Sound Delay”, etc., which can delay other tracks/buses for re-syncing purposes).)
In short: you can not do that (at least not without re-compiling Ardour from source). And even if you do change it, you can get in trouble when bouncing or recording overdubs.
Ardour’s latency compensation does a lot more than PDC, it includes I/O latencies to align recording with playback.
For mixing only, you can use some plugins that delay, but don’t report latency. and you don’t need to force reported plugin latency to zero (Ardour will just read-ahead). You can use a Delay plugin regardless of Plugins that introduce and report latency. Overall latency won’t be worse if you first force PDC off.
Ardour allows to override the latency reported by any plugin (edit the plugin with generic controls), but in Ardour 5 setting the value to “0” means “use latency as reported by the plugin”. So the best you can do is to set it to “1 sample” for plugins that report latency >0. Still I don’t see a why yo want to do that. You can just add a delay after the latent plugin to ‘undo’ the latency compensation, which is what you want to do anyway.