External Instrument Plugin Issue

[Spoff77]

Hi,

I am following Ableton's and a bunch of YouTubers advice by using the Ableton External Instrument plugin to get rid of latency as Ableton lists as a best practice:

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... instrument

I set up a template and have one of these on every channel of each hardware synthesizer. The issue is that when setting the Audio From in the plugin drop-down to my audio interface input, things get drastically loud. I figured out this is happening because it is adding up the input signal across all of the External Instrument instances. For example if I have one of these set up on each of 10 MIDI tracks (so 10 External lInstruments total) then the incoming signal gets duplicated by 10 as each track has an External Instrument plugin listening to the audio input.

Is there any way around this? The only way I have found so far is to have all the Audio From of the External Instrument plugins set to No Input, and then I just change the input to my interface when about to record. But it would be nice to record without having to turn on and then turn off the input every time I record a track.

In my case it is listening to an Apollo interface if that makes any difference.

Thank you for any suggestions,

Spoff

[[jur]]

Do your HW synths have their own separate input on your audio interface?

[Spoff77]

They do not, as they are all plugged into a mixer and that outputs a stereo signal to the interface.

What I have been doing as a workaround is not using the External Instrument Plugin (and using the options in step 6 in the linked document above) and just recording and then moving the audio within the sound files using Command-Option-Shift-Drag (on a Mac), which actually is a lot quicker and less annoying than it sounds. But I am dealing with music that is easily aligned to a beat - if it was less defined then this wouldn't work, and it would also be painful if I was dealing with hundreds of audio files.