True SMPTE-Lock / Tempo-Independent Audio in Live — A Real-World Problem

[diegux]

Hi all, I want to describe a workflow issue I hit recently that I think exposes a fundamental gap in Live's handling of tempo maps with multitrack recordings.
The scenario:
I have a session recorded with real musicians, no click track. Multiple audio tracks, all recorded simultaneously. I want to use the drummer's track as the tempo master — set it to Lead, generate a tempo map that follows the natural feel and fluctuations of the performance. Standard stuff.
The problem:
The moment you generate the tempo map from the drummer's track, every other audio clip in the session becomes desynchronized. Even with Warp OFF, clips don't have a true SMPTE-lock mode — they're still interpreted in beats relative to the project tempo. When the tempo map introduces fluctuations, Live recalculates clip positions and everything drifts. The audio that was perfectly in sync during recording is now a mess.
The obvious workaround (Warp ON) doesn't solve it cleanly either. With Warp ON, Live tries to stretch the audio to follow the new tempo map, which is the opposite of what you want. Getting it to behave as a true "anchor" requires careful warp marker management, and at scale across many clips it becomes impractical.
What we actually need:
A per-clip option to lock audio to absolute time (SMPTE/sample position), completely independent of the project tempo map. Something like a "Time Lock" toggle that tells Live: this clip plays at its original sample position, no matter what the tempo does. This is a solved problem in other DAWs and it's genuinely surprising it's not in Live in 2026.
Pro Tools has had SMPTE lock for decades. Reaper handles this gracefully with its tempo envelope system. For a DAW that positions itself as a serious production tool — and is increasingly used for post-production, live recording, and hybrid workflows — this omission is hard to justify.
The use case is not niche: any engineer working with live recorded material who wants to grid-conform a session after the fact runs into this. It's a core multitrack editing workflow.
This is also critical for audio post-production workflows. Anyone doing dialogue editing, sound design, or music scoring to picture needs audio clips to stay locked to their absolute timecode position regardless of any tempo changes in the session. In post, the picture doesn't move — your audio can't either. A tempo map adjustment for a music cue, a click track, or a scored sequence should never displace dialogue or effects tracks that are locked to a specific frame. Without true SMPTE lock, Live remains a second-class citizen for post-production work, forcing engineers to either avoid tempo maps entirely or maintain a parallel Pro Tools session just for what should be a basic DAW feature.
Hoping this gets traction. Happy to elaborate or provide a session example if useful.

[phil archer]

I have no solution to this, but just wanted to add my agreement. It's crazy that this still isn't a feature in Live.