LATENCY COMPENSATION!!

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
muzza23

LATENCY COMPENSATION!!

Post by muzza23 » Thu Feb 19, 2004 4:25 am

is it a realistic wish that live will at some point have latency compensation?? for my money, the lack of this is the only thing that stands in the way of live being the single wickedest audio application on the planet... lack of it is frustrating because loops obviously become out of time by a few hundred samples when there are a few of live's native effects on them, and latency with VST effects is far worse...

if there's a way, please find it because at the moment it is a serious impediment.

serotoninsteve
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Post by serotoninsteve » Thu Feb 19, 2004 11:16 am

Hello!
Yes indeed! I´m DJing with Live and when I´m playing a track dry to the master and the other goes to my send with all the fx on it, it becomes like a doubler effect, specialy for the drums it does sound muddy.
Ableton´s, please check that for next release.
Greetings! 8)

skiptracer
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Post by skiptracer » Sat Feb 21, 2004 11:16 pm

oh jesus, so THAT'S why...

i just assumed Live had dely compensation and that was somethign that happened in all programs...

serotoninsteve
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Post by serotoninsteve » Mon Feb 23, 2004 7:52 pm

Hello!
I´ve tried out a simple delay on the tracks without other fx (set to 10-15ms) and this helps a lot!
Greetings! 8)

Guest

Post by Guest » Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:33 pm

There's a possible workaround but it's pretty inconvenient. You can place the same plugins on every track but simply bypass the plugs you're not using and the latency might be the same for each track. I haven't tested this thoroughly in live but I've heard of people doing this in other apps.

muzza23

Post by muzza23 » Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:48 pm

*BUMP*

just thought i'd bump this to reiterate how wicked it would be for latency compensation to be sorted out... im drooling at the possibilites!!

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Mar 23, 2004 1:59 pm

serotoninsteve wrote:Hello!
Yes indeed! I´m DJing with Live and when I´m playing a track dry to the master and the other goes to my send with all the fx on it, it becomes like a doubler effect, specialy for the drums it does sound muddy.
Ableton´s, please check that for next release.
Greetings! 8)
Here's the skinny, y'all--when you use effects on the sends but your track is set to "master out", you are hearing the track as normal PLUS the send sound with effects on it. Indeed the send sound is a bit behind, depending on how sweet your system is and what effects are on the send. However, this is not Live's fault in my mind, and I can't imagine how it would compensate for it with its on-the-fly approach. The solutions are to use effects on the tracks themselves, or to have the track out set to "sends only" so that you only hear whats coming through the sends. If you leave it set to send only, you can just turn the send effects on and off. Basically, the sends in Live and other apps are adding the send sound to your original sound, so you get increased volume and both signals. The slight delay of the send signal as it passes throught he effects makes for a not-so-good doubled sound. I'm hoping that Live will make the mastger out/sends only midi mappable, to enable one to quickly throw tracks into the sends.

Ryan

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Post by montrealbreaks » Tue Mar 23, 2004 11:23 pm

...
Last edited by montrealbreaks on Wed Jun 22, 2005 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Mar 23, 2004 11:50 pm

I too would definitely want to turn it off (if ever implemented), as I am recording loops of instruments in real time live, and want the lowest possible latency/delay at all times. Any buffering or signal delay of any sort would be a problem. For instance, with the sends discussed earlier--if you sent a piano clip to a hungry reverb on the sends and Live did compensate, then it seems everything would have to be delayed by that amount. As you said, just having the sends and the effects on the would probably automatically create extra latency, even if nothing was routed to them, simply because they exist in the set. Otherwise (if having nothing sent to the sends canceled the compensation), when you sent something to the sends, there would be a wierd second where either all the audio slows down to sync with the send, or something.

Ryan

dirtystudios
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Post by dirtystudios » Tue Mar 23, 2004 11:52 pm

there are several freeware latency compensation plugins out there. i can't remember the names and i'm too lazy to look them up, but they're out there. you can put these on any track that needs it, or if you just have one track with a heavy effect (like robobear...love it, but damn) you can route all your other tracks through an aux send and put one instance of a late-comp plug instaead of twenty or so.

k

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Post by serotoninsteve » Sun Mar 28, 2004 1:10 pm

Anonymous wrote:
serotoninsteve wrote:Hello!
Yes indeed! I´m DJing with Live and when I´m playing a track dry to the master and the other goes to my send with all the fx on it, it becomes like a doubler effect, specialy for the drums it does sound muddy.
Ableton´s, please check that for next release.
Greetings! 8)
Here's the skinny, y'all--when you use effects on the sends but your track is set to "master out", you are hearing the track as normal PLUS the send sound with effects on it. Indeed the send sound is a bit behind, depending on how sweet your system is and what effects are on the send. However, this is not Live's fault in my mind, and I can't imagine how it would compensate for it with its on-the-fly approach. The solutions are to use effects on the tracks themselves, or to have the track out set to "sends only" so that you only hear whats coming through the sends. If you leave it set to send only, you can just turn the send effects on and off. Basically, the sends in Live and other apps are adding the send sound to your original sound, so you get increased volume and both signals. The slight delay of the send signal as it passes throught he effects makes for a not-so-good doubled sound. I'm hoping that Live will make the mastger out/sends only midi mappable, to enable one to quickly throw tracks into the sends.

Ryan

No, I´m using 2 sends set to sends only!
One without fx and one with all my fx, I´m using a bitstreampro controller configured that when turning on 1 knob the 2 sends knobs in Live are turning together, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, so I can switch from no fx to fx in one move.
I´ve now set a simple delay (~10 ms) to my dry send and for me it works, but for playing instruments in realtime this might be not so good?
Greetings! 8)

Guest

DSP card users need this also..

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 31, 2004 10:35 pm

Yes, I could really use this feature in Live for mixing with my UAD-1 card!!

DSP cards have inherent delay (UAD-1 and TC PowerCore). These cards work perfectly with Live, so we don't need to buy Cubase SX or Nuendo, but without Plug-in Delay Compensation its a bit of a pain to compensate for the delay manually. Please add this feature for us DSP card users Ableton!

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Post by sweetjesus » Thu Apr 01, 2004 2:02 pm

I dont code audio software, so I may be wrong (feel free to correct me if i am anyone...), but in theory, to get live plugin delay compensation, you would have to have your sound card's latency set to a higher value than the plugin chain you have with the highest latency.

Let's say you have a filter plugin introducing 6ms of latency and your sound card's latency is set at 4ms. Tweaking the filters settings will still produce results 6ms later, but your sound card has 4ms to output the information thus resulting in a timeshift due to 2ms of audio being lost.

Otherwise the guys at Ableton may have to write an addition to their timewarp modules which allows the audio engine to traverse backwards in time and predict the future...

Still, most plugins should be able to have their latency compensated with a sound card latency that is still at a respectable value... CPU usage would probably only be affected during the initial calculation of the delay compensation. After that, the audio stream is processed as normal is it not? The initial calculation could cause cpu spikes.

Per Boysen
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Post by Per Boysen » Fri Apr 02, 2004 12:03 pm

As I understand software there are two ways to achieve latency compensation in audio streams.

One is to program a "look ahead" function for the plug-ins. This does not work with any live input ore live tweaking of knobs/parameters. In the first place evertying has to be recorded for the "look ahead" delay compensatin to take action.

The other way is to delay all streams that do not keep any plug-ins.

Whatever method used will make the softare less inspiring for real-time work, i.e. the marketing point of Ableton Live. I'd like to chime in with Ryan and say "let's have it, but please make it optional so we can turn it off if we like"
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
http://www.perboysen.com

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Post by spookydirt » Fri Apr 02, 2004 7:31 pm

are you all talking about plug-in delay compensation?

surely latency compensation is something quite different. and would make real-time tweaking even more un-responsive. or is it a combo of the two?

Traction has PDC and that only costs £50. i understand it took him 2 days to program that in, so i'm sure Live4 should have it. or live 3.5. there's no excuse, really.

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