Deadmau5 Latency Issue tracking vocals

[fishmonkey]

Sorry Pitch Black but according to the Live's lessons you should set the driver error compensation in a direct monitoring scenario.

You say:

If you use zero-latency monitoring (i.e. pass-thru before A/D conversion) on your audio interface to get your dry monitoring signal, and keep the actual recording track's monitor to OFF, audio should always record perfectly.

This is not true according to Live's lessons and Deadmau5 for that matter.

On top of that the Ableton Live 9 Driver Error Compensation seems to be unreliable.

as Pitch Black said, you only need to set the DEC if your audio hardware driver is not reporting the correct latencies.

how is using the DEC "unreliable"?

[stevep314]

As far as I know there is no hardware driver latency reporting to Ableton? That's the whole point.
You would expect it yes, as all other major platforms (Cubase, Protools, Logic) do have an automatic reporting.

[Pitch Black]

BUT DOES IT WORK PERFECTLY FOR TRACKING???

YES!!!!!

drunk video:
https://vimeo.com/197090377

Merry Christmas Y'all!

[stevep314]

Ok, I just tested it myself with a cable going from the output to an input. I also have a RME FW400.
So there must be hardware latency reporting going on to Ableton. As the waveform seems to line-up perfectly:



I wonder why the mau5 has issues then tho. Maybe because of the MADI interfaces that don't report to the RME.

Thank you for your time!

[kenporter]

There is latency reporting to Live, as mentioned in my initial post, especially if you use something as solid as a RME interface. The Driver Error Compensation lesson even mentions, hey if you don't have any delay offset when recording your audio output to input directly then good for you, meaning hey your audio interface actually compensates for the A/D conversion in the driver and reports it to Live so Live can offset the track correctly, i.e. being sample accurate.

Now, if you would use any conversion or gear that has latency outside of Live, then obviously Live doesn't have a chance. Meaning let's say you have some piece of gear that converts the output from Live, does some processing, introduces latency and spits it back out into Live. Then you will see it being offset in Live, which obviously is not Ableton's fault. Even then you could use the external audio effect device and compensate for the outboard hardware latency in the external effect device itself.

Just like I mentioned in my first post, I don't think Deadmau5 is correct with his statement. Amazing that he has so much power that one incorrect statement warrants a two page discussion on the Ableton forum.

Ken

[Pitch Black]

Amazing that he has so much power that one incorrect statement warrants a two page discussion on the Ableton forum.

It's 2016, fake news! fake news!

[jamief]

I will have to study this post and thanks Pitch Black for your lessons. Its not just Deadmau thats has issues Ken Porter and consider the resources he has to hand and time he spends with live and his "Success" he should have nailed this a long time ago if its a straight forward as is being made out. I've had endless bloody headaches with this problem over the years on different sound cards etc etc.
I wish there was bloody fix it all switch for this shit.
I have a LOT off outboard. D Machines, fx and Synths

Just like I mentioned in my first post, I don't think Deadmau5 is correct with his statement. Amazing that he has so much power that one incorrect statement warrants a two page discussion on the Ableton forum.

Ken

[kenporter]

Hi Jamief,

A few things. No doubt I think Deadmau5 is super talented when it comes to music and has some good gear knowledge too. This being said, to me this particular issue is pretty straight forward. I've used Live for a very long time, have taught it for a very long time and have not had any of the driver issues. Even with interfaces that didn't report the latency of the A/D conversion, Ableton's tutorial is pretty straight forward. To be fair that was the actual issue we've been discussing.

Any other issue, i.e. Plugin delay compensation, outboard gear etc. could have all sort of different causes. All of which most likely can be solved. I've encountered many various issues myself, driver compensation not being one of them, and unfortunately all DAWs seem to have them.

So, yes Deadmau5 has great success, and he is very, very good at what he does, but his statement was still incorrect. Just because he is famous and has access to tons of resources doesn't make him correct all the time. I am an engineer, having designed many musical instruments in my career and am an Ableton Certified Trainer and I am still wrong a lot too. Anyway... Happy Holidays!

Ken

[fishmonkey]

using outboard equipment definitely complicates things, as neither your audio interface nor Live can determine what extra latency is being introduced by the outboard. this will be compounded if you have chains of outboard, and especially if you tend to re-patch things a lot...

[Stromkraft]

I'd venture to say that Joel is correct on this. I don't know exactly what was said though.

Having finally seen the video I have no idea what Joel is on about.
I still stand by this statement though, that would seem to be about something related but not the same thing.

I suggest to use "off" for external recordings that can be monitored in the audio interface or acoustically. This might only concern MIDI though, but this is not my experience.

No. I have not made extended testing, but this have come up numerous times with external recording and using monitor "off" fixed it basically all those times.

There is no problem with internal recordings, which I have tested. No difference that I can find, also with External Instrument connected to internal plug-ins.

So with monitor set to "off" you are getting instant monitoring from the instrument itself, say a guitar stack, acoustic drum or your voice or an instrument that plays back at the input of your audio interface/board.

Your timing is on the beat that you are hearing on the head phones, right? So Live records this as you play it, the timing of which is based on the playback. That's the timing reference and you adjust your playing both to that and the sounds from the instrument that you are playing (vocals). With low latency this is recorded more or less on the beat.

But what about with monitor set to "Auto"? Here I think Live assumes your playing is affected by the fact there's latency between the playing of the instrument and hearing it as all the latency it takes for the audio coming out likely means your timing is affected by when you hear it. What your hear of your playing when you have no immediate monitoring is late because of latency in the system. As the rest of the playback is equally late this doesn't mean much if you play with these limitations.

Ableton assumes with monitoring active that you are adjusting your playing to be on the beat. To be able to do that you need to be ahead of the beat. Therefore the recording is latency compensated to sync with the playback and not when you played it. This way what you hear is what will playback.

Again, it might be this only affects live performance MIDI recordings, but I think it would be bad design to not have it work the same with audio tracks. And when you're deep into latency issues and setting monitor to "off" fixes this, then something like this must be happening. There may be more variables though.

Here's what the manual says

"Monitoring can be turned off altogether by choosing the Off option. This is useful when recording acoustic instruments which are monitored “through the air,“ when using an external mixing console for monitoring or when using an audio hardware interface with a “direct monitoring“ option that bypasses the computer so as to avoid latency. Generally, it is preferable to work with an audio interface that allows for negligible latencies (a few milliseconds). If you are recording into Live with monitoring set to “Off,“ you may want to make the Audio Preferences’ Overall Latency adjustment, which is described in the built-in program tutorial on setting up the Audio Preferences. "

14.1 Monitoring (Live 9 manual)

This is clearly not fully supportive of what I just wrote, but it's not contradicting it either.

If I had the time I'd do some testing. On my list…

[fishmonkey]

I suggest to use "off" for external recordings that can be monitored in the audio interface or acoustically. This might only concern MIDI though, but this is not my experience.

So with monitor set to "off" you are getting instant monitoring from the instrument itself, say a guitar stack, acoustic drum or your voice or an instrument that plays back at the input of your audio interface/board.

Your timing is on the beat that you are hearing on the head phones, right? So Live records this as you play it, the timing of which is based on the playback. That's the timing reference and you adjust your playing both to that and the sounds from the instrument that you are playing (vocals). With low latency this is recorded more or less on the beat.

of course you would have monitoring off on a channel that you are directly monitoring. it would make no sense to do otherwise.

and, your audio interface does not have to be low latency for this to work. as long as Live knows the correct in/out latencies it can adjust the recording time so that the new audio is recorded with the relationship that you heard when you were playing. Live knows that you heard the playback slightly late (because of the output latency), and it knows that it is seeing the new audio slightly late (because of the input latency).

Here's what the manual says

"Monitoring can be turned off altogether by choosing the Off option. This is useful when recording acoustic instruments which are monitored “through the air,“ when using an external mixing console for monitoring or when using an audio hardware interface with a “direct monitoring“ option that bypasses the computer so as to avoid latency. Generally, it is preferable to work with an audio interface that allows for negligible latencies (a few milliseconds). If you are recording into Live with monitoring set to “Off,“ you may want to make the Audio Preferences’ Overall Latency adjustment, which is described in the built-in program tutorial on setting up the Audio Preferences."

i think what the quote from the manual is implying is that if you have a very low latency interface, then it opens up the option of software monitoring through Live. if you have an interface with high latency then you may always be forced to use direct monitoring instead (the way it has been worded isn't very clear though)...

[Stromkraft]

I suggest to use "off" for external recordings that can be monitored in the audio interface or acoustically. This might only concern MIDI though, but this is not my experience.

of course you would have monitoring off on a channel that you are directly monitoring. it would make no sense to do otherwise.

That's not stopping quite a lot of people totally ignoring this. I think you have no idea what I see people do with Live quite often. People are busy making music instead of thinking about these things. Urgency rules.

This is especially true when running external MIDI sequencers trough internal audio interfaces and I've found that recording with monitor off works really well whereas auto just puts everything late (in those sessions anyway).

Some people have a habit of putting external synths to be monitored inside Live for different reasons, even if external monitoring is the most natural for external sound sources. These kinds of issues can sometimes be solved with Hardware latency offsets, but that doesn't always work out well.

As with anything else you encounter issues in different ad hoc set ups and you have to solve them on the spot to track everything in place in the session.

[cmprvndncr]

What an epic thread. I read (nearly) all of it...

Just wanted to chime in with all this: I didn't see anyone mention using your ears (I may have missed it)...

Alls I'm saying is: latency or no... If it sounds like you want, don't worry about a few milliseconds here or there... If you're getting phasing, or destroying a groove, etc, then take a closer look I guess... For a lot of stuff, I don't think it matters more than listening and enjoying... What I'm trying to say is that worrying about it can get in the way of actually making music / mixing / whatever you wanna do with ableton...

I would suggest just to be aware that latency is a thing, and if some timing is off to your ears, it could be latency, then it could be worth trying to fix..

Direct monitoring = great (as said earlier)
Latency on non-recorded fx = not an issue (as said earlier)...

From all this thread, it seems like ableton compensates for the latency you hear when tracking... ie. 10ms of delay which you hear when monitoring input = what you hear is what you get... Provided the latency is very short, this seems like a good idea...

Anyways, what do I know. <3

[braduro]

I have a particular vocal tracking scenario which is based on a few requirements:
1) Recording a raw track from vocalist through preamp.
2) Recording a compressed track using an outboard rack unit which is used for direct monitoring just to the artist, to reinforce the performance. (Sometimes the compressed track is balanced and transparent enough to proceed from there, so I always record it as well.)
3) Feeding a mix of vocal effects that are internally played back through live, because I don't have an external effects processor. This is only to give the artist a better sense of where they fit in the mix-a little singing in the shower ambience (delays, reverb, eq.) This insert is phase inverted so the artist is getting only effected signal through live-none of the dry- and hearing direct source through direct monitoring.
4) Only cued tracks (solo button) comprise the mix for the artist.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3ed9r ... sp=sharing
(Despite, public-level visibility, couldn't figure out how to embed this image with Drive...)

So here's the issue: in order to feed the vocal effects (which is essentially a DAW playback track), in my case the group aux for the vocal tracks, I need to have monitoring to IN or AUTO for one of the two vocal tracks that I'm recording. And I need to have the solo button engaged for the Aux track with the effects on it. Wouldn't that result in a delay for the vocal track being sent to the effects? Wouldn't that shift the performance of one vocal track relative to the other? Should I be shifting something back to compensate for it? Where do I do this in track delay, driver error compensation? Is there a better option between IN and AUTO in this case, given that I don't really need to hear either? Is there a better way to do this? Granted, I have a thunderbolt interface, and the latency is only 3 or 6 ms (96k or 48k). But I do lots of polyrhythmic stuff, so I'm conscious of the pocket.

[fishmonkey]

i suggest putting the vocal effects on a completely wet return channel, with the source vocal channel (or group) set to output to "Sends Only"...