Help me understand hardware synth latency in L9

[natallica]

Hello everyone -

I am trying to record hardware synths into Live. My MIDI track has the External Instrument instrument set up and a MIDI clip. Whenever I record any hardware synth there is always some amount of delay on the audio clip -- which makes sense. However, wouldn't adjusting the Hardware Latency value of the External Instrument have Live compensate for the delay in some way? No matter what value I type as the latency, I get the exact same delay in the recorded clip.

Am I just not understanding what Hardware Latency does within the External Instrument?

It seems like the only way I can fix the delay in the audio is to find the first transient and "Set 1.1.1 Here" and just be done with it, but there are times when I don't want the audio warped.

How are others dealing with this?

Thanks so much!

-- N

[bosonHavoc]

have you adjusted you buffer size to the lowest possible setting without glitching at 80% CPU in preferences?

[natallica]

Thanks for your quick reply.

I had been recording with buffer size = 64 and that was giving me about 19ms of delay in the recorded audio.

I just checked and I can go down to 32 without glitching and that gave me about 17ms of delay -- no matter the Hardware Latency setting in External Instrument.

[UltimateOutsider]

In Live 9, make sure Help > Help View is enabled, then click Show all built-in lessons and step through both of these tutorials: Setting Up Audio I/O and Driver Error Compensation. Also carefully read section 14.1 Monitoring in the Live manual, because the way that monitoring affects how Live records is something that I didn't understand until I'd been using it for a year.

Until I learned how Live handles monitoring and driver error compensation, I used to think that latency was just a fact of life with Live- ~30ms delay guaranteed on recorded audio. But now I can record audio with under 1ms latency with my interface's buffer at 256 samples.

If you go through those and make the appropriate changes and you're still not seeing an improvement, come back.

[natallica]

I have it working now. I decided to try making a new Live set just for testing the External Instrument setup and even though it looks like I had the MIDI and audio tracks set up the same way in both projects, it now works.

I'm baffled as to why, but I'm not going to argue.

Thanks for the suggestions.