So what happens is the automation curves don't happen when they're supposed to, so when you try to automate something to happen on a particular beat you have to put the curve a bit after the beat for it to sound on the beat. In addition to this, when you use 3rd party plugs the automation offset is different from Live's built in effects, plus it's different again with plug-in delay compensation turned on and off and all of this seems to be dependant on the output latency(Buffer Size). Anyways I made some sample pictures which show exactly what's happening.
So in the picture above I've got Linplug's RMV playing drums on every beat and Utility and Sonalksis FreeG both with identical mute automation patterns. The first track shows the MIDI and the automation curves i used for the tracks underneath. The tracks below were duplicates of the original that were frozen and then flattened so you can see the waveforms generated by the different plug-ins and delay compensation setting. Although Utility and FreeG both have identical Mute automation curves the output is not the same. Stranger still is that when FreeG was muted and un-muted it didn't even last a whole beat like it was supposed to(shown in the highlighted bit in the picture). The delay compensation also had an impact on when the automation happens as well. So anyways, onto my next sample.
So here I did the same thing, except that FreeG and Utility are only processing an audio file, not a VST instrument like in the previous example. As you can see in this image the only time the automation did what it was suppose to was when delay compensation was disabled with Utility doing the automation. What a pain it'll be if I have to bounce all my instruments to a wave file and then automate them only using Live's effects just to get the automation to behave like it's supposed to. Anyways my last example shows the effect the output latency has on the automation offset.
This last one is something I made a while ago, which I sent to Ableton but they've yet to respond to me about it. It shows a similar thing except the tracks have been frozen whilst using different Buffer sizes. As you can see, the only time the automation lines up is when using the lowest latency settings or when automating a Live effect that's on an audio track(or possibly a Live instrument too, haven't tested) with delay compensation on. Both of these solutions aren't really helpful as my projects are usually too CPU intensive to be able to use low latencies and I'd doubt my hard drive would appreciate streaming heaps of audio at the same time. Btw this is all done using ASIO drivers with a Presonus Firebox with latest drivers on Vista.
Does anyone else get this same problem or know of another solution? Has it been fixed in Live 8? Or for some reason is it just my set-up?
