Lag when recording audio on my new Macbook pro M1 Pro

[proudestmonkey]

Hi.

I made the jump from Logic to Ableton recently. Maybe a couple of weeks ago on my old Macbook pro from 2016. Everything worked fine and I grew fond of Ableton and its perks. Then I got my new Macbook pro 2021 M1 Pro yesterday. I spent the day getting the machine up and running and finally got to start playing around with some music in the evening.
When I tried to track some vocals I found that Ableton, for some reason, recorded the audio with a slight delay.

I went in and double checked my perferences. My buffer size is 128, same as i used on my old macbook.

I simply can't understand why this uber praised computer can fail at a so simple task. I would get guess there is something else I'm doing wrong?
The recording chain is unchanged from before. That's what makes it extra weird. The exact same setup, soundcard, mic etc.

Then I thought it might be the new versions of my plugins, but the same keeps on happening without plugins.

Anyone else experienced this?

[proudestmonkey]

It might that the plugins is to fault. Did some more testing, but that seems strange doesn't it?
Shouldn't this computer be able to handle a couple of compressors and a limiter on the master bus?

[proudestmonkey]

Sorry for spamming my own post, but I found the problem.
When I have the monitoring set to off it records fine and in time, but when it is put to auto or In it records with delay.

I really don't understand why my new macbook pro with M1 chip have issues with this where my macbook from 2016 did the job.

[miyaru]

Live 11 is not native to M1...... I guess that is the problem. I'm on PC/Live 10 so I'm not sure.

[proudestmonkey]

Ok.
So this is basically a software issue?
Have you experienced this?

[BanishedHero]

TLDR: Yes it looks like it's software issue; it looks like Ableton Live can't account for the latency that is added when Rosetta translates Intel Applications for Apple Silicon (M1/M1 Pro). Thankfully the Beta fixes it.

I just downloaded the Ableton Live 11.1 Universal Beta, and it finally fixed latency issues that I've been trying to troubleshoot for the last few hours.

For context I am running:
MacBook Pro 14-inch 2021 with M1 Pro (8CPU/14GPU)
Scarlett 18i8

I noticed this issue when I was trying to record drums, and latency felt like 50+ ms. This was like trying to compensate for an extra 1/32 - 1/16 note delay which was maddening. I checked my preferences, and cranked my sample rate to 192KHz with a buffer size of 64 samples, and even though my reported Overall Latency was 6.92 ms, it sure didn't feel/sound like it. Luckily I have a windows machine I could test with, and the Overall Latency on that that 14ms, and it was way more responsive, so I could tell something was up on the Mac. After installing the Beta, the reported 6.92 ms finally feels true and responsive.

Now fair warning, it looks like the Beta, since it is now M1 native, will only support plugins that are M1 native as well. My Celemony and Little Altar Boy plugins don't seem to be detected anymore, and it looks like it's because they only currently run under Rosetta. Basically your DAW/Plugins need to be Rosetta/Rosetta or M1 Native/M1 Native.

Soundtoys released a helpful article about it here:
https://www.soundtoys.com/m1-capability/

What a wild time to be music/tech nerd.