Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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3BMcebFL
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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 10:40 pm

Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by 3BMcebFL » Fri Apr 27, 2012 10:24 pm

I'm having a problem with delay well recording vocals and other instruments. My latency on audio preferences is set to zero with compensation. I never have any problems with audio dropout and my computer seems handle the load, even on big mixes, just fine. My issue is that while recording on miked instruments or vocals the processed signal coming from the DAW has significant delay, even if all I have is an ableton compressor and EQ on the track. I did the delay compensation error tutorial although I don't believe it has anything to do with the signal coming through the software itself.

Does anyone know why this is happening? I know you can set audio delay compensation track by track but this seems very tedious and I'm not sure to calculate the delay compensation time necessary to make the return signal closely match my live vocals. This delay makes it very difficult to line up vocals correctly with the track or sing them with the beat as the delayed process signal blares. Thanks for your help!

UltimateOutsider
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Location: Portland, OR

Re: Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by UltimateOutsider » Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:13 pm

The important numbers in Audio Preferences are buffer size, input latency, and output latency.

Input latency is the one that's gonna cause headaches when doing any kind of live recording. Assuming you've got the correct Driver Type and Audio Device selected there, you can reduce latency by decreasing the Buffer Size, at the cost of increased CPU load and potential recording instability.

The Digi 003 seems kind of uncommon for Live use, but so long as the drivers are supported it should work, I suppose.

3BMcebFL
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 10:40 pm

Re: Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by 3BMcebFL » Sat Apr 28, 2012 4:20 pm

Yeah, I just moved back to Live after a long stent back on ProTools. So you think a MOTU is an outboard box better suited to live? I'll try out your suggestions today. Do just to check your saying that regardless of setting a compensated latency of zero at a given buffer size, for recording what you need to be looking the input latency for the buffer size. This causes delay regardless of your system being able to compensate fully at a given buffer size? Thanks for your help.

UltimateOutsider
Posts: 241
Joined: Sun Aug 30, 2009 7:02 am
Location: Portland, OR

Re: Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by UltimateOutsider » Sat Apr 28, 2012 4:49 pm

3BMcebFL wrote:Yeah, I just moved back to Live after a long stent back on ProTools. So you think a MOTU is an outboard box better suited to live? I'll try out your suggestions today. Do just to check your saying that regardless of setting a compensated latency of zero at a given buffer size, for recording what you need to be looking the input latency for the buffer size. This causes delay regardless of your system being able to compensate fully at a given buffer size? Thanks for your help.
I've never had to mess with any kind of compensation setting. Live 8 has a "driver error compensation" but that's for special cases where the interface doesn't detect/report the true latency correctly. Latency is affected by the speed of your PC, the speed and congestion of your bus (PCI, PCI express, USB, FireWire, etc), your interface drivers, the interface hardware itself, the buffer size, and probably some things I'm not aware of.

You alter your buffer size in your device's own control panel, which you should be able to get to by clicking "Hardware Setup" in Live by going to Options > Preferences > Audio.

And regarding alternative interfaces; I really just went with MOTU because of brand loyalty. :) My first MIDI interfaces for Mac back in the early 90s were MOTU, and they were the first brand I thought of when I decided to move into digital audio on the PC. The sound quality is great, the latency is undetectable, but my box has more inputs and features than I'll probably ever need. If you shop for another interface and are concerned about latency, you might want to spend a little time on the DAW Bench forums.

claydough25
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Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2012 6:07 pm

Re: Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by claydough25 » Sat Apr 28, 2012 4:52 pm

I had a similar issue when recording drums into protools... Fixed it by adding predelay to the armed track... weird solution but it worked... might want to try this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NA9mg0TSN0

vietboi94
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Feb 19, 2013 11:41 pm

Re: Latency/delay issues - Ableton w/ Digi 003

Post by vietboi94 » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:26 am

hi... can one of you guys check out my new post i just posted and help me out? it has to do with latency but a little different. please im desperat for help

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