Playhead is BEHIND the audio (and beat)

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RexKramer
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Joined: Fri Dec 11, 2009 1:37 pm

Playhead is BEHIND the audio (and beat)

Post by RexKramer » Sat Jan 25, 2025 10:50 am

This is a very weird issue and I am going slightly mad trying to work it out.

When I play back anything (even an empty clip and just have the metronome going) the position of the playhead in relation to the beat is slightly behind. But I am only seeing this in the clip view, not when in arrangement view. In arrangement view the playhead seems to be in sync with the beat.

For example, say the metronome clicks for the first beat of the second bar, the playhead is still at a position within the first bar (around about a semi quaver behind the metronome). I have tried almost everything:
- Switching delay compensation on and off
- Disconnecting all external midi and audio equipment
- Playing with buffer size

I've even gone as far as to completely reinstall MacOs and now only running Ableton Live. Even the demo tune when nothing else has been added shows this behaviour

If anyone has any thoughts or tips it would be hugely appreciated. Currently Ableton is slightly unusable for me as it's really hard to tell which notes are actually playing.

BTW - I'm aware this may well be something stupid little thing I'm missing, but the fact I'm now running a fresh version of MacOS and Ableton I don't know what it be.

(I am running this on a Mac Mini M1 2020 - I have checked the behaviour on my MacBook Pro and not seeing the issue there)

Many thanks in advance
John

[jur]
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Re: Playhead is BEHIND the audio (and beat)

Post by [jur] » Sat Jan 25, 2025 6:43 pm

Did you try a set without any plugin?
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RexKramer
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Dec 11, 2009 1:37 pm

Re: Playhead is BEHIND the audio (and beat)

Post by RexKramer » Mon Jan 27, 2025 10:13 am

For those that are interested, I did eventually resolve this. It was simply due to the fact that I had scaling set on my screen resolution. Apparently this is a known bug in that Ableton has lag on the GUI if you pick scaling on the display options. It's a shame as I now have a nice hi res monitor but can't use it at anything other than the default without getting this screen lag.

Unless anyone has heard otherwise I don't believe there is any fix or work around for this.

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