It came with a license for Live Lite, and this was one of the reasons I bought this controller, as I'd convinced myself that Live was the way I wanted to go based on great reviews and features. (I'm actually using Live 10 Trial at the moment)
The main purpose of what I wanted to achieve is 2 fold.
1 - to write sequenced MIDI drum tracks with using a previously recorded audio file as a guide via collaboration with other musicians.
2 - to write my own music using MIDI keyboard input and a few audio tracks.
I'm currently trying to work on the first idea but am having lots of trouble with, you guessed it - MIDI latency.
I realise this is a very common and frustrating difficulty in many DAWs, with many different causes and solutions, but I'm hoping you can suggest some things to try.
In the example I'm using, I have just 1 MIDI track, blank with nothing in it. Using 1 of the built in sounds as the output (Sounds > Piano & Keys > Grand Piano), with all settings at default.
Buffer settings are as follows:
- Input 256 Samples (as low as it will go)
- Input latency = 5.80ms
- Output 1024 Samples
- Output Latency 23.2ms
- Driver Error Compensation -29.00ms
- Overall Latency 0.02ms
Playing a piano is not too bad, and I can play along with the click fairly OK, although it's not quite instant.
When trying to play in drums however, using either the pads on the controller or keys, there is a bigger lag, and you can hear a delay between when you hear the physical sound of me tapping the pad, to hearing the drum sounds through Ableton. It feels like between 40-100ms delay.
I have watched a few videos and read some threads about this, but can't find anything specific that applies to this, or that I fully understand.
For comparison I've tried Mixcraft 9 and this works about 50% better out of the box, although still not quite perfect.
In case it makes a difference, I'm not using ASIO drivers (not 100% sure what these do, but I remember using in the past, and have seen it referenced in recent threads.)
My PC (FWIW) is as follows:
- Intel Core2Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz)
- 4GB RAM
- Windows 7 64 Bit
- No dedicated audio interface