What is the right way to avoid lag in audio from external MIDI instruments ?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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robbret
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2021 7:23 am

What is the right way to avoid lag in audio from external MIDI instruments ?

Post by robbret » Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:28 am

Dear fellow Live enthusiasts,

New Live11 user here so please forgive me if I don't use the right terminology.

I am looking for pointers on the correct way to deal with timing differences between different external instruments.

My setup is as follows:
iMac computer running Ableton Live11 for recording
External sequencer/drum machine on audio track 1 (USB audio).
This sequencer is also sending MIDI over USB to my Mac, which is porting the MIDI over USB to an external synth using an app called MIDIpipe.
The audio from the external synth is coming in on track 2 (USB audio).
The external synth and the sequencer are synced to Live11's tempo.

The audio coming in from both tracks is slightly out of sync.
I can manually adjust the track delay for the leading track to hear the instruments in sync.
However as soon as I stop the sequence and restart, the timing changes and the audio is no longer in sync.
Same goes for recording, as soon as I hit record, audio goes out of sync.

I have a feeling I should be using Live11 to route the MIDI between the sequencer and the synth, but I'm not really sure how to proceed.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Chancery
Posts: 159
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2020 9:59 pm

Re: What is the right way to avoid lag in audio from external MIDI instruments ?

Post by Chancery » Sat Oct 23, 2021 6:07 am

I may not be understanding your setup correctly.
Ideally you'd connect the seq/drum machine to the synth directly via 5-pin midi, and just sync L11 to the seq/drum machine. That midi doesn't need to go through your computer.

In case either device doesn't have a 5-pin midi connector, the way to get midi from your external sequencer into L11 and back out into your synth is to set up a midi track receiving midi from your sequencer. Then insert an External Instrument device in it and set it to send midi to your synth and receive the audio from it (or not, see next paragraph).
To record that audio from your synth, you can try either setting the audio track to receive the audio directly from the USB audio (as you're doing now) or receiving the audio from the midi track with the External Instrument device in it. Try which one works best latency-wise.

Alternatively, you could record the midi sequence from your external sequencer into that midi track you just set up, disable the external one and just fire the midi from L11. But I suppose your external sequencer is part of your workflow and how you like to get stuff done

jlgrimes
Posts: 1773
Joined: Mon Jan 22, 2007 1:55 am
Location: Atlanta, Ga

Re: What is the right way to avoid lag in audio from external MIDI instruments ?

Post by jlgrimes » Tue Oct 26, 2021 12:11 am

robbret wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:28 am
Dear fellow Live enthusiasts,

New Live11 user here so please forgive me if I don't use the right terminology.

I am looking for pointers on the correct way to deal with timing differences between different external instruments.

My setup is as follows:
iMac computer running Ableton Live11 for recording
External sequencer/drum machine on audio track 1 (USB audio).
This sequencer is also sending MIDI over USB to my Mac, which is porting the MIDI over USB to an external synth using an app called MIDIpipe.
The audio from the external synth is coming in on track 2 (USB audio).
The external synth and the sequencer are synced to Live11's tempo.

The audio coming in from both tracks is slightly out of sync.
I can manually adjust the track delay for the leading track to hear the instruments in sync.
However as soon as I stop the sequence and restart, the timing changes and the audio is no longer in sync.
Same goes for recording, as soon as I hit record, audio goes out of sync.

I have a feeling I should be using Live11 to route the MIDI between the sequencer and the synth, but I'm not really sure how to proceed.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Its been a long time since I tried this but I remember almost 10 years ago. Ableton's midi/sync wasn't that great and had issues with midi clock. I don't know if it has ever been fixed, I remember I was trying to record stems from a Fantom keyboard and Live was all over the place. I closed Live and tried Sonar which worked much better. I remember this being a known issue back then. That said I don't know if it ever was resolved as I don't often try to do those type of tasks anymore (not with Ableton or any DAW for that matter). That said there might be other ways of getting this done.

My guess the most straightforward method would be just recording drumloop into Live and Warp audio to correct any timing discrepancies without using midi clock. But also I'm not sure why Midi Pipe is needed. If you got a USB/midi adapter, I'm not sure if you would need any extra software than Live (in theory). Maybe the Midi Pipe could be the issue.

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