ADC not working properly in Live?

[Toonman]

I was wondering if anyone else was having problem with delay compensation in Live. I've had this for several versions... it seems ADC doesn't work well. I'm wondering if something is wrong with my setup.I've made sure Delay Comp is checked in the menu... and it doesn't seem to work (it does make a difference from having it off, of course).

To illustrate the problem, I've created a video with a simple drum loop that I send to a compressor for parallel processing. I compared Live against Pro Tools. You will noticed that with Live, when you bring up the send level, you get this phasey sound... which means the return is not coming in at the same time as the original audio. Later on, with PT, you'll hear the tracks are just perfect (even though PT LE/MP has NO ADC!!). I also tested Reaper (no movie for it), and AD also works as expected over there.

Any ideas what might be going on? Here's a link to the video...

http://www.screencast.com/t/MzkzYTE3Mz

(Sorry for the flaws in the video... the auto-zoom feature is wild, and the audio varies from Live to PT... long story... but you'll get the idea).

Cheers!

[massenmedium]

Do you have any other plugs in that live set that might be reporting their latency wrong and messing up the delay compensation?

I've had a quick go and I don't think I get something like that happening using RoughRider in Live 8.1.4b2.

[Toonman]

There are no plugins on the set besides the compressor. The idea was precisely to perform a test as objectively as possible.
I guess that now that you mention it, my next test will be to exclude all plugins from loading, and see what happens if I do the same... I don't see why, but maybe something in there is... screwing things up somehow? That would be weird for sure...

The LAST possibility would be for this to be related to some general system stability issues I've been having... although I don't see why Live would be affected by this, while PT and Reaper seem to be doing just fine...

*Sigh*... looks like it's time to go get Windows 7 and Norton Ghost for me... oh, well... it was going to happen anyway...

I'll let you know what I find... thanks!

[massenmedium]

OK, I tried a test closer to what you were doing there - with the drum track going into a group and then to the compressor on a send and I can confirm that it does seem to be out of time - i.e. it's phasing. Doesn't seem to matter if there's plugin on the send or not.

So I would say there is a problem, and it's introduced in this case by monitoring through another audio track.

[massenmedium]

Try setting the Audio From on your group tracks to 'No Input'.

That seems to stop the problem.

Good eh?

[Toonman]

Niiceee... thanks mass! Looks like Live is doing some interesting routing there, which results in two signals with one sliiightly delayed... that explains why also trying to set a DC value manually never worked for me...

Thanks! Problem solved... next!

[Swordfish]

nice one...I have gotten this phasing for years using sends. I stopped all parallel processing because it just didnt work....

[3phase]

Try setting the Audio From on your group tracks to 'No Input'.

That seems to stop the problem.

Good eh?

nice finding.. i think you should file a bug report... the input setting of tracks that are not armed nor do input monitoring shouldnt effect the internal timing of the program..

actually it shouldnt effekt the internal timing even when beeing armed or input monitors...

[massenmedium]

Yeah. I'm not sure if it is a bug exactly, although it would be interesting to know what Ableton say about it.

What was happening with this is that the track was being used as a group, so audio was being routed to it from other tracks and obviously monitoring was On. The Audio From wasn't being used but was set to the default Ext In anyway.

I'm working here without an audio in to test this but is it the case that when Audio From is set to Ext In and monitoring is On then a track is monitoring from external audio and any tracks that may be routed to it? In other words, the track is monitoring from two quite different sources simultaneously.

Maybe it could handle it better though, I'm not sure.

[massenmedium]

OK, I sent a bug report.