Ableton Forum

howdy,
I'm getting to grips with ableton and have done some recordings straight to it, now i want to dump old cassettes mutlitracks in, that are quantized for future editing, or clip insertion.

Let me explain my process.
i have two types of songs
1 - 4 tracks of audio inc drum machine
2 - 3 tracks of audio with 1 track of roland fsk sync for r5 r8.

with option one i am using a redsound beat extractor to gen midi clock from the drum track, and sending the midi to ableton via my computer interface.
with option 2 i just plug the midi out of the drum machine into my interface.
i have no problems sending midi clock into ableton and starting the recording.

what do i want to achieve.

i want to use the midi clock to start ableton recording and keep it in sync with the music on tape so it is quantized and i can fiddle about with the audio later. I know there is midi latency and audio latency, that is not a problem, nor is the actual tempo.

so here is what i do.
set ableton to ext sync, press record button.
press play on cassette tape, this starts the drum machine/beat extractor which then starts ableton.
i monitor input via my mixer not via computer because of the lag.
once the recording is done i set master tempo and warp tempos to be the same for playback/future recording..

when i am done i expect all tracks to be synced with ableton tempo for the whole song, quantized correctly so i can chop and edit the audio easily.
i know due to midi delay that each track starts a little late, but i can just remove the delay with an edit, and i expect all 3 tracks to be in sync, so i can drop drum samples from ableton, or record external drum machine.

however i am getting very strange results.

upon playback usually one of the 3 audio tracks drifts out of time with the other 2.
an example is one song where i had bass, guitar, vocals. The bass and vocals were rock solid in time, but the guitar gradually went out of sync with the other two tracks, even though i recorded them all simultaneously from the same cassette, and they are in sync on the cassette.

if i record the 3 tracks without using ext midi sync they all stay in time with each other, but are obviously not quantized in ableton.

As a newbie i am sure i have some setting wrong but i'm not sure which one.

so to summarize i am using midi clock to start ableton recording 3 simultaneous audio tracks from a cassette multitrack so they are quantized in ableton, and i can add clips or drums etc, but after recording one random track drifts out of sync with the others.

It might be worth checking "auto warp long samples", under the record/warp/launch tab in Live's preferences is set to "off". That should prevent Live trying to warp audio as you go. If Live's getting the warp wrong that would result in tracks being out of time with each other.

Also check that the start marker in each recorded clip is actually at the beginning of the clip, I've seen Live dork it a few times and offset it slightly if you had autowarp on as described above.