Do you have a computer that was made within the last 5 years? Does it have an integrated Realtek audio controller in it? Chances are you’ve experienced latency issues with the audio due to Realtek’s poorly written drivers, which Realtek to this day still hasn’t fixed. Typical effects of latency include a slight delay before playing audio and annoying pops and clicks (glitches), usually when Windows plays a sound event.

There are a few ways to address the problem. One way is to switch from the Realtek audio driver to the generic Windows High Definition Audio Device driver, which results in cleaner and un-doctored audio in some cases. However, no matter what you do to prevent it, Windows Update may eventually force install the latest Realtek audio drivers back onto your computer, which brings you right back to square one. For the longest time I haven’t found a permanent solution to get rid of the latency, until now.

Reduce Audio Latency, or REAL for short, is a small program that does exactly what it says… Reduce the latency of the audio. It runs as a background process inside a command prompt and essentially reduces the size of the audio buffer, which in turn minimizes delays with the Deferred Procedure Call (DPC). Just simply run REAL, and as long as the program is open, the audio latency will actively be reduced. There is also a switch that allows you to start the program minimized to the system tray so that it’s out of your way. However, if you want REAL to run automatically every time you start Windows, you’ll have to manually add it to the registry. To do this, open the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Create a new string value inside that key and name it REAL. Double-click on the newly created string and under value data, enter the path where REAL is located, with quotes before and after. Make sure you add --tray at the end of the path, otherwise it will not start minimized to the system tray. The path should look something like this:

“c:\<directory path>\real.exe” --tray

Enjoy!

Note: REAL is currently available for 64-bit editions of Windows 10. Hopefully compatibility for 32-bit editions as well as older versions of Windows will be available at some point by the author.