Arrangement Playback In Sync but Recording of it Goes Out of Sync

[monnomme]

I have been experimenting with how to integrate my hardware with Ableton lately. The method I'm following is arranging everything by recording MIDI loops which trigger the outboard devices on playback. When I listen back to my latest Arrangement, everything is perfectly together and it sounds great. I put a lot more time into refining things to make the track sound better, so I do have quite a few FX on the different channels.

Here's the setup: one VST melody, two synths melodies triggered by MIDI loops and then input through my audio interface, and one drum synth triggered by MIDI loops and then run out through a delay pedal into my audio interface.

Everything sounds great as a MIDI structure, and now I want to capture each track as audio. I arm 5 Audio tracks and record the Arrangement, mainly tweaking the drum settings as the best-ever version of my song sings through the speakers...

But then on playback, the different Audio tracks fall out of sync. I'm browsing around posts on latency and delay compensation, but I'm not finding discussion of this particular problem very readily. Any ideas my friends? Struggling to get a basic easy recording setup going. Thanks!

[Tarekith]

Try turning off warping for the audio clips you just recorded, does that fix it?

[monnomme]

@tarekith Thanks for the suggestion. I managed to fix the problem by dragging one of the tracks slightly forward in time. It turns out that the one internal Ableton MIDI instrument I am using recorded right from go, whereas the other three tracks - all external gear synced via MIDI and lined in to capture their audio signals - were a hair behind. I had been blindly hoping the software would simply correct this on its own. Fortunately, each of these three external tracks are in sync with each other. And when I noticed the little gap in time at the start, when I dragged the internal MIDI track's audio forward, it even snapped perfectly into alignment with the other tracks.

Is it possible then that this gap is 'standard' for my setup? And that I could manually add this into delay compensation somewhere for future recording purposes? Things didn't happen entirely perfectly on their own this time around, but I made an important realization about latency and am happy the solution turned out to be simple enough. Still, it would be great to program this issue out of existence, lol.