Audiophile 2496 and Live - bad delay (Latency?)

[colkai]

Hi folks,
Well, tried my first attempt to record in Live last night and it was awful.
Everything I played came out delayed so laying down a second track meant on playback, it was behind the played track.

I went into Cakewalk Audio 9 and used my onboard soundcard inputs and got no delay whatsoever, could overlay tracks easy peasy.

Switched to the M-Audio 2496 and Live and it was like playing through a digital delay.

My Pc is an HP DX2250 AMD 3800+ (2.4GHz)
2GB of RAM
When I'm actually recording in Live, the CPU meter barely flickers above 1% so it sure ain't CPU load!
My Settings for the 2496 is
Patchbay: H/W OUT 1/2 - Monitor Mixer
Hardware settings DMA buffer 1024 latency samples

In Live Intro 8.09
Input buffer size is 1024 samples
input latency 23.2 ms
Output buffer is 1024 samples
output latency 23.2 ms
Driver error compensation is at 0.00
Overall latency 46.4 ms


I'm confused as to why a cheap onboard can record with no latency at all, even in LIVE and yet the M-Audio card, which from all I've read is a darned good card, it causing me such grief.

On top of this, it seems the metronome vanishes after the lead-in is played.
Is there some definitive settings I need to set to get Live working well with the 2496? In terms of both latency and what my monitoring etc needs to be?
It seems awfully convoluted and complex where I can just select my input in Cakewalk and off I go.

I bought Live hoping to use the benefits it offered over Cakewalk but right now, I ain't getting diddly.

Help? please?

[jallan99]

Did you get any help with this?

I switched to an M-Audio 2496 from a E-MU 0404 USB because of latency problems. But the M-Audio card works fine for me. I have the Input buffer size set at 256 and that is fast enough. Do you know that you can set the buffer size by clicking on the Hardware Setup button, which is a couple of buttons above the the bit where Ableton tells you about the number of samples in your buffer size?