Blackmagic Design just released Fairlight Live at NAB 2026, and it's all over my feed. A fully-featured software mixer that turns your computer into a broadcast-capable live mixing engine, at no cost. As of this writing, it's still in public beta, but you can download it now.
Blackmagic Fairlight Live
For a lot of churches, the broadcast mix is already happening in a DAW like Reaper, ProTools, or Studio One. Audio comes in from the console, gets mixed in software, and goes back out to the stream. Fairlight Live works the same way, so the question I had was simple: how much latency does it add?
I ran the tests so you don't have to.
The Test Setup
I tested Fairlight Live on an M2 MacBook using Core Audio with a Behringer WING connected via USB. Everything ran at 48 kHz. I measured actual round-trip latency by sending a signal out of the WING, through Fairlight Live, and back in, then compared it against the same test in Reaper. For the X32 users the latency numbers should be pretty much identical!
What I Measured
Here's how Fairlight Live compares to Reaper at the same buffer sizes:
Buffer | Reaper | Fairlight Live | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
64 | 7.50 ms | 8.79 ms | +1.29 ms |
128 | 10.17 ms | 12.94 ms | +2.77 ms |
256 | 15.50 ms | 20.94 ms | +5.44 ms |
At buffer 128, Fairlight Live adds about 2.8 ms more latency than Reaper on the same hardware. The difference scales with buffer size - at 256, the gap widens to about 5.4 ms.
The pattern I observed suggests Fairlight Live uses a 3-buffer architecture compared to Reaper's 2-buffer approach. That extra buffer period is what creates the latency gap.
What This Means for Your Broadcast Mix
For stream mixing, buffer 128 at around 13 ms is workable. Most engineers won't notice this, and video encoding adds far more latency than audio processing anyway. Fairlight Live's latency is unlikely to be the bottleneck in a broadcast workflow.
For talent monitoring through the software, the latency starts to matter more. At buffer 128, you're looking at nearly 13 ms of round-trip delay. If you're sending monitor mixes to talent through Fairlight Live, you'll want to factor this in.
The blog post has the full latency table across all buffer sizes, plus an explanation of why Fairlight Live's published latency numbers look different from what I measured.
Until next time,
Drew
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