LIVE 7.01 MIDI TIMING PROBLEM

wehkah · Post by **wehkah** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 4:41 pm

i know whats the problem, i have the same sporadically. i used ableton with a small setup of vsts and internal units, after a short time the midi timing goes up to approx. +20ms or so.

i think its a bug of the engine?!

i have made all troubleshootings to fix any timing problems in Live and i have no solution. if i restart ableton > the timing its ok.

the version 6 works fine.

PS: mostly the failure returns in using drumrack with the mpd16 over my midisport but the midihardware setup is not the problem < i think

Any update planned?

peace&sun
wk

Synthbuilder · Post by **Synthbuilder** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:16 pm

wehkah wrote: PS: mostly the failure returns in using drumrack with the mpd16 over my midisport but the midihardware setup is not the problem

Have you ensured that the driver setting in Live is set to MME. The default in Live 7.0.1 is Direct Music and the midisport is not natively supporting this. Live uses an emulated DM driver which suffers from these delays so using the MME option is essential.

wehkah · Post by **wehkah** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 6:22 pm

Yea, my setup is a m-audio delta 1010lt card with asio. i use only asio, but thanks for this info.

the timing problems are returns if only the midi port of my delta card is in use.
i have checked up all settings and tested any worst cases but i cannot find any solution.

thanks for your answer
wk

Synthbuilder · Post by **Synthbuilder** » Sun Jan 06, 2008 8:28 pm

wehkah wrote:Yea, my setup is a m-audio delta 1010lt card with asio. i use only asio, but thanks for this info.

the timing problems are returns if only the midi port of my delta card is in use.
i have checked up all settings and tested any worst cases but i cannot find any solution.

ASIO is related to your audio drivers. Live also chooses your midi drivers too and this is nothing to do with the ASIO setting. midi drivers are now selected in the midi preferences section. They weren't available at all in Live 6 since Live 6 always used MME ones.

Click on the little arrow next to the midi device's name and it will reveal the driver type. Select MME and not direct music.

wehkah · Post by **wehkah** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:01 pm

uuuh, thx. i think its working well. thx a lot

i still waiting for the update to fix the other bugs.

great software, i like to play with it.

cheers
wk

citrik · Post by **citrik** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:56 pm

Hi All,

This is a bug in either the Midi engine or monitoring code of Live. It's been a long lasting bug since around version 5. The problem comes in when you want to use Live to monitor anything related to external midi.

It's not an issue with your midi interface, we've tried them all. A lot of us have professional high end studios and all our setups work fine with other apps. It happens on both platforms, Mac and PC.

This is the giant thread that's been going since the Live 5 days.

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ht=#555504

The ppl at Ableton are great and Live is definitely one of the most innovative tools for making music, but this bug is really frustrating. I use an Genoqs Octopus for sequencing and if I send Midi data to a plugin or to an external synth the data comes out all randomly delayed. If you turn monitoring off the data locks up perfectly. It is an issue with how Live monitors incoming data. Ableton claimed that Live 7 was to have a fully rewritten Midi engine and we were all hoping that would be the end of this bug but that's not the case. At this point I've switched to Logic for composition and building of all my loops...

I wish they could figure this out.

Hopeful but frustrated

Citrik

elemental · Post by **elemental** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:05 pm

has this been resolved yet?

I find extreme midi delays with a busy set.
Also I am about to invest in a Genoqs Nemo, and looking to sequence clips and instruments in live from it... but not if I'm gonna come up against this problem.

I find as a set gets bigger and more plugins etc the delay becomes worse until I just cant play stuff in any more.

musicmachine · Post by **musicmachine** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 5:24 pm

elemental wrote:has this been resolved yet?

I find extreme midi delays with a busy set.
Also I am about to invest in a Genoqs Nemo, and looking to sequence clips and instruments in live from it... but not if I'm gonna come up against this problem.

I find as a set gets bigger and more plugins etc the delay becomes worse until I just cant play stuff in any more.

I had the same problem with timing getting worse the larger the project on my old laptop. I find the timing to be much better on a new laptop running vista though still not perfect. Saying that i've been using my R3 as a midi interface streaming midi over usb and i think the midi timing is better than my audio interface. I contacted the abes about this before and asked if they had any tips on improving the timing and they said use a dedicated midi interface. keep the midi and the audio seperate.

elemental · Post by **elemental** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 5:50 pm

musicmachine wrote:
elemental wrote:has this been resolved yet?

I find extreme midi delays with a busy set.
Also I am about to invest in a Genoqs Nemo, and looking to sequence clips and instruments in live from it... but not if I'm gonna come up against this problem.

I find as a set gets bigger and more plugins etc the delay becomes worse until I just cant play stuff in any more.
I had the same problem with timing getting worse the larger the project on my old laptop. I find the timing to be much better on a new laptop running vista though still not perfect. Saying that i've been using my R3 as a midi interface streaming midi over usb and i think the midi timing is better than my audio interface. I contacted the abes about this before and asked if they had any tips on improving the timing and they said use a dedicated midi interface. keep the midi and the audio seperate.

Cool. I'll have to try that - currently using an RME Multiface for MIDI.
Cheers

idealist · Post by **idealist** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 11:34 pm

i get a delay know when changing the clips, anybody knows somerthing about that?
It's all the time prefect, but when I change a clip it gets a delay, when I change again it get's another one, sometimes after changing 4 to 8 times it gets correct again...

(the same happens when live makes the loop in the arrangement view)

What can I do? Why now, why didn't I have this problem before?

Live 7.07
Setup Macbook Pro 2.33
Fireface 400
XBase888 (but it should be the same with my 808 or 303, didn't try ot out yet)

It's strange, never had this bug before, but maybe i didn't realize because i allways recorded my 808 before changing clips in live...

edit: it was a corrupted file!

musicmachine · Post by **musicmachine** » Sat Sep 06, 2008 3:48 pm

idealist wrote:i get a delay know when changing the clips, anybody knows somerthing about that?
It's all the time prefect, but when I change a clip it gets a delay, when I change again it get's another one, sometimes after changing 4 to 8 times it gets correct again...

(the same happens when live makes the loop in the arrangement view)

What can I do? Why now, why didn't I have this problem before?

Live 7.07
Setup Macbook Pro 2.33
Fireface 400
XBase888 (but it should be the same with my 808 or 303, didn't try ot out yet)

It's strange, never had this bug before, but maybe i didn't realize because i allways recorded my 808 before changing clips in live...

edit: it was a corrupted file!

Don't know. What's your global quantization set to? If i'm having problems i find the best thing is to contact the abes direct, usually get a response within a day or so. Beats waiting for a reply on a forum! Cut out the middleman

I can confirm that there is a BIG difference in timing between the midi on my soundcard and the midi I/O on my R3, timing is almost perfect

So anyone having these problems with their soundcard should try a usb midi interface. It makes sense giving the midi data it's own stream, nothing else can interrrupt it. And isn't usb faster anyway?

channelite · Post by **channelite** » Sun Sep 07, 2008 7:26 pm

I'm having a midi delay problem when I'm trying to record a beat in a clip. When the metronome is playing and play a beat with the pad kontrol, the notes are recorded about a 1/32 off. On my old mac, Studio Vision would record my performace very close to the beat. If I record in Live with 1/16 input quantization, the note go the second 1/16 note instead of the down beat. I'm getting the same result when playing the Axiom 25. Why is my recording so off?

Carl Lofgren · Post by **Carl Lofgren** » Mon Sep 08, 2008 4:08 pm

channelite wrote:I'm having a midi delay problem when I'm trying to record a beat in a clip. When the metronome is playing and play a beat with the pad kontrol, the notes are recorded about a 1/32 off. On my old mac, Studio Vision would record my performace very close to the beat. If I record in Live with 1/16 input quantization, the note go the second 1/16 note instead of the down beat. I'm getting the same result when playing the Axiom 25. Why is my recording so off?

Hi - I am far from being a MIDI expert when it comes to Live, but I've been struggling with the same problem for some time. But it seems now I found a solution which works (so far).

First I followed the built-in tutorial for how to manually compensate the delay that the sound card creates. After 20 minutes or so I found out that I have to set Live for a delay of 56 samples (will probably be different in your case). This makes sure that the audio is aligned correctly. Secondly I used an external sequencer (hardware) that were playing in sync with Live. In Live I made an audio track playing a 4/4 kick, and had my hardware sequencer play the same kick via MIDI. With both of the kick-tracks playing you can easily hear the difference - the audio track is the correct one - and all you have to do is to go into MIDI settings, choose your MIDI interface and the port you are using and starting experimenting with the delay setting here. On my setup I had to make a negative delay of eight ms or so. Now my MIDI and audio are super tight.

channelite · Post by **channelite** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 3:33 am

Thanks for the tip. I did Setting Up Audio i/o and Driver Compensation and found that a buffer size of 128 samples is more suitable for me then 512 which was the default for the motu 828mk3 which I had been using. This at least makes my drum hits fall closer to the down beat than a 1/16 note over, with quantization on. I only have another mac, an old Quadra 650 with Studio Vision for an external sequencer to try the other part of the test. I'll try the test when I get all the midi cable plugged in. The Quadra doesn't get much use these days. Thanks again.

mok · Post by **mok** » Tue Sep 09, 2008 12:02 pm

yes, i had the exact same problem: my motu828 mk II youldn´t handle audio AND midi, it always delayed the sync after a couple of loops... now that i use my axiom25 für midi-sync and the motu ONLY for audio everythings fine again... never had these problems with live 6 and my old fasttrack pro - there i always used midi & audio-port together... strange but now it works.

musicmachine wrote:
elemental wrote:has this been resolved yet?

I find extreme midi delays with a busy set.
Also I am about to invest in a Genoqs Nemo, and looking to sequence clips and instruments in live from it... but not if I'm gonna come up against this problem.

I find as a set gets bigger and more plugins etc the delay becomes worse until I just cant play stuff in any more.
I had the same problem with timing getting worse the larger the project on my old laptop. I find the timing to be much better on a new laptop running vista though still not perfect. Saying that i've been using my R3 as a midi interface streaming midi over usb and i think the midi timing is better than my audio interface. I contacted the abes about this before and asked if they had any tips on improving the timing and they said use a dedicated midi interface. keep the midi and the audio seperate.