Ableton Forum

Ive got my two external hardware synths hooked up to Live using "external instrument" but it seems that the midi is kind of shitty. When I play a note there is sometimes a bit of delay which makes for awful sequence recording.

Im generally just confused about latency and why and where it occurs. Its been implied to me somehow that to fix this "delay" you go through the sound card preferences, this makes no sense to me. I don't see how the two are connected.

I tried adjusting latency knob on External Instrument but as I increased it it just got more out of sync. At 0 ms there was still a delay.

I use a little Edirol midi interface but I have midi ports on my sound card. Would response be faster if I used these instead?

I was getting a midi lag in Live7 also. I found lowering the buffer in the audio preferences fixed it somewhat. I didn't realize it but I had the audio buffer for my motu 828mk3 set at 512 samples. I now keep it at 64 samples. I think Live is a little notorious for not having the best midi. I haven't done any serious midi sequencing in Live 8 to say that it's better.

what are your computer specs? Shitty midi comes also from shitty computers. I use live with midi controllers and it works fine. Maybe you have to use asio drivers.

blitit wrote:what are your computer specs? Shitty midi comes also from shitty computers. I use live with midi controllers and it works fine. Maybe you have to use asio drivers.

Ive got a Pc with an Emu 1212 m sound card. I use the "Emu Asio driver". The problem is that it doesn't let me adjust buffer size. There's also that annoying doubling effect when I arm an audio track.

edit: Was not trying to at all imply that live is the problem.

I got a new USB midi interface (ESI M4U XL 4x4 usb MIDI interface), and found that midi was unusable in Live - massive delays and echos. This problem did not occur with any other midi software, and Ableton support was not very helpful. In the end, I downloaded Midi Connection Center and connected the ESI hardware ports to virtual midi ports using Hubi's Midi Loopback, and all is well. You may want to try something like that.

Si