Ableton Forum

why is the latency from a track with a soundcard input different than the same track with an external (fx or instrument) getting the same input(i get about 3 ms difference, which is A LOT(enough to get a flam))

it's not normal that the external thing introduce latency as it basically is just piping the same signal than the normal track

only workaround i found is to get all 18 inputs from my soundcard as external fx and instruments as the tracks that were left alone (i had 1 external instrument for drums, plus 4 tracks with kick, snare, etc) and they were all soner than the external instrument track, so i had to put all these inputs as external fx returns to avoid flamming on the drums

anyone has a better workaround?

7 views in 3 days, bump it up!

I think this is something you should contact Ableton support about

i mean i found a workaround its not like its unusable like the 1000 scene limit, but its a shitty implementation, another thing i hope 9 will address

but it might actually be a bug that could be fixed sooner.

One thing though - are you using any other plugins on those tracks - like FX after the ext. inst. plug in etc? Some of them will introduce some latency.

And each track has it's own delay setting, so you could set them to -3ms - delay is hidden by default, you show it with the D button bottom right with crossfade/i-o view etc

i did the testing with no plugins and only a sine burst when i was calibrating the system

problem is that im using external midi devices so the midi would get delayed back too and it wouldnt fix anything

but as i said, i used ext fx on every track that were set to using their own input so that got rid of the different delays, i just delayed all playback tracks to match the midi tracks (and midi is so unreliable, while testing, playing a click in live and a click triggered via midi from live played by the tribe and back in, the position of the midi note relative to the audio click live vas playing, the position was never the exact same, sometimes 2ms sometimes 3 sometimes -1
so until i can get an 8core machine and get rid of all external gear, i will just live with it

btw, thanks a lot for trying really hard to help me, it's really appreciated

I'm not completely sure I understood you, but do you think the problem is because the external FX/instrument has to deal with roundtrip latency, instead of just input latency?

I imagine there's just as much latency going out of your hardware as coming in.