Ableton Forum

Hello! I am somewhat new to Ableton and I am having issues recording with latency. Ive tried everything my friends and I can think of. Whether I record with the monitor on auto or off, and seemingly whatever configurations of In/Out Sample Rate, Input/Output Buffer Size, and Driver Error Compensation I use there is always a delay between what Im playing and what Ableton is recording. If I record using a metronome, even playing simple quarter notes, right away the guitar part plays out of sync with the metronome. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

What's your OS and audio driver? And sound card?

I have a Dell Inspiron 3493 using Windows 10. It uses Realtek High Definition Audio Driver and Waves MaxxAudio Pro Application sound card

The easiest route is to turn monitoring off on your guitar track and use your audio interface’s “direct” mode to monitor what you’re playing. You won’t hear any fx that you’ve added to your track, but this is the most foolproof way to get a latency-free recording.

If you do need to hear your fx while recording, then it gets trickier. The second easiest method is to record into Arrangement View and create a duplicate track for your guitar, which you also arm for record but turn monitoring off. After you finish recording, delete the track that had monitoring turned on, and keep the one that had it turned off.

This explains how to do it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT5mD2Zd7F8&t=11s

I actually already watched that video and unfortunately nothing helped me there

Your laptop Realtek soundcard would be the prime suspect.....

Realtek chips aren’t intended for low-latency professional standard audio production. You might want to consider obtaining an audio interface which has low latency ASIO drivers supplied by its manufacturer.

As an alternative you might be able to use ASIO4ALL to reduce latency - it works better for some people than for others. Though a dedicated audio interface will give you better recording quality than a PC’s built-in sound system will.

I’ve used ASIO4ALL with a Realtek chip and got latency down low enough to record single tracks at a time. If you have lots of tracks, just do a quick mix down to one stereo track for monitoring and then turn the other tracks off to avoid dropouts while recording/monitoring. You’ll probably want to switch back to one of the Windows native drivers and bump your buffer size back up for your final mix, though.

Changing the audio driver did the trick! Thanks for all you help everyone

And now you can even monitor the track you are recording on and just need to switch "Keep Latency" off on that track - all explained here: https://blog.abletondrummer.com/how-to- ... n-live-12/

and in the Youtube vid here: https://youtu.be/h1p347mmR-s