TR 8 USB and Driver latency compensation (solved)

[florian42]

Any problems in my posting below, are solved now.
1. The bad sound quality of the TR 8 external input came from the output of the TB3 wired into it.
If you turn the volume knob of the TB 3 above 2 o'clock it's getting to start overdriven.

2. To avoid my problems with the driver latency compensation, I had to use the external instrument plugin from live for monitoring.
And for recording I had to use another audio track with input routed from the external instrument track and monitoring switched off!

So I'm happy now and can use everything with perfect timing and no glitches and very nice sound quality.
Thanks to Apple for creating aggregate devices, to ableton's working driver latency compensation and to Roland creating these very nice
aira devices.

Below here is my original post including all my failures. So you don't need to read any further except you are interested in my setup.


Hello,
I am running ableton live 9 on a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.84 and a motu 828mk1 sound card
Recently I got a Roland TB 8 and a TB 3 and realised that the sound quality of the external in of the TB 8 is really bad
and I'm wondering that nobody else recognised this. I've already checked this with a second unit in another studio
and this is obviously very poor sound quality.
I am liking the external in ducking function very much. So I decided to try the USB audio of the TR8.

First things went promisingly good. I created a aggregate device with the TB 3, TB 8 and the Motu, which surprisingly
let me use this device with 44,1 kHz and gives me a round trip latency of 7.5 ms @ 64 samples buffer size.
As result everything runs fine and the 34 inputs and 24 outputs are using 8% of CPU power,
even the external input of the TR 8 sounds good now.

I had a lot of fun with the setup, until I ran into timing issues while recording.
It took me several hours to find out, that the driver latency compensation does not work while monitoring is activated.
(Please tell me that I am wrong, I don't even want to start to think about, how many recordings I've messed up in the last
years while leaving monitoring on or auto.)

This means when I have monitoring activated I can hear the TR 8, but the recorded file is 7.5 ms too late and too short.
When I switch monitoring off, the recorded file is okay, but I can't hear the TR 8 and TB 3.

To me it is essential to hear what I am recording and have the correct timing afterwards.

Is there any possibility to use monitoring and Driver latency compensation at once?

[Leetenant]

I have almost the exact setup you have. I am having latency with MOTU Traveler and Aira gear. I am unaware of the external instrument plugin for Ableton. Can you offer some set up advice?