MIDI without audio ?

[Glennzone]

I do nothing at all with audio in Ableton Live; I don't use the plug-ins, instruments or anything. I use Session View MIDI exclusively.

I output that to Vienna Ensemble Pro v5, which has the ProFire 2626. It seems that Live, even though I only use it for MIDI, must have an audio interface, so I use the MacMini's internal audio interface.

If I turn off the audio engine, and try to play or record MIDI, there's no transport activity at all. If I could stop the audio engine and somehow keep MIDI operational, I imagine that could help stabilize Live, but I don't know

Is there a command line switch, or some other preference file setting which can keep the MIDI timing consistent for Session view loop recording and playback without the audio engine ?

All told, I use about 250 MIDI tracks, and with the audio engine on, the MIDI timing is unstable. While recording MIDI on a single track, the recording AND playback are totally unusable. Just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas offhand.

Glennzone
MacMini 2.3Ghz Core i7, 16GB RAM
Live 8.4.2, M4L, Vienna Ensemble Pro 5, other stuff

[Glennzone]

I got it resolved. I also have Soundflower as an installed audio driver. Selecting that instead of the internal audio interface immediately dropped the CPU utilization down 40% to 3% !

No more problem, but now I have a new one :

When I record a single MIDI track, the record start and stop of the clip is reasonably instantaneous, and works well. When I record a Group track of 16 MIDI channels, the first 8th note's worth of performance data goes missing, and in playback, loops without it. Again, I'm recording\playing back nothing but MIDI, so the bandwidth should be minimal.

I'm going to try setting the buffer size higher, and NOT setting it the same as audio buffer. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

Thanks,
Glennzone

[darkenedsoul]

Track Delay maybe? Look into that as that's only thing I can think of.

Mike