Record delay in Ableton

[pedritomunez]

Hey everyone!
Maybe this topic already exists, sorry if it does — if someone could drop me a link, that’d be awesome

So here’s my problem: out of nowhere, my audio track started having delay when recording vocals with 'Monitor: In' turned on. This never used to be an issue — everything worked perfectly. At first it only happened in one project, but over time it started affecting more and more projects. Now it's at the point where it only works properly if I open a brand new project. As soon as I record one take, the issue comes back.
Basically it’s unusable. The recorded vocals are completely off, like something’s wrong with the warping or timing. What the singer hears in the headphones is also delayed, which is super distracting.

My CPU usage never really goes above 30%, sometimes it's already slipping at like 3% CPU load.
I tried tweaking the settings, resetting everything, hoping I messed up something — but no luck. My input latency shows 4.76 ms.

Here’s my setup:

Microphone: AT2020
Soundcard: UAD VOLT1
Laptop: MacBook Air M1
DAW: Ableton Live Suite 11
And maybe the most important detail: I’m using a cheap Chinese USB dock for all my connections. Could this be causing it? But then again, if that was the problem, shouldn’t it have been an issue from day one instead of getting worse over time?

Thanks a lot for any help!

[cids]

Direct monitoring
Use direct monitoring on Volt to hear your live input signals with no latency. Direct monitoring routes Volt’s inputs directly to its outputs, but you can still hear audio from the software. This allows you to use higher buffer sizes when recording while still hearing your live inputs without latency.

[yur2die4]

Some plugins / devices will add latency to the processing of audio coming into Live.

It could be a wide range of possibilities (some reverbs, spectral, autotune, vocal or guitar fx processing, mastering). And the device could be on Any channel in the set and increase the overall latency of the set as a whole, affecting all channels.

The possible channels it could be hidden in are audio channels, return/send channels and the main summed output channel.

If I recall you can hover your mouse over devices and there will be a little info on the corner of the screen reporting the amount of latency that device adds to your set. If you’re not sure about that, you can also just start removing devices from your set until the latency is manageable again. —make sure you are actually REMOVING the devices. Turning them off has no effect on reducing the latency.