Obscure Latency Difficulty in Live 12 - solved

[patekswiss]

So i switched to Live 12 and the system I'd had in place for recording vocals to accompany Live MIDI tracks was suddenly producing delayed vocals - 30 to 70 msec of delay whereas with Live 11, I'd had pretty much perfectly aligned vocals.

So a lot of things came together to confuse the issue. One was Live 12 itself, with its somewhat complex and klugey delay compensation setup compared to 11. It's supposed to give more options, but its thoroughly confusing - different settings for each tracks, hidden, delay compensation indicators, an overall delay comp setting in the menus - its a lot.

What I was finding was that even with turning off all delay compensation everywhere - per track, for the overall program - I was still getting delayed vocals when I recorded audio tracks while monitoring - not through Live - but in real time through my audio interface (UAD Apollo Quad 2).

This was with lowering audio samples all the way down to 32 - which I can fortunately do with a new Mac Studio M3 Ultra. But in Live 11, I'd had perfectly timed vocals without delay using audio samples of 1024 - which I needed to do to get my Trashcan to work somewhat reliably.

So what was the problem? I had Loopback running on my system. Loopback is one of those systems that enables you to route audio in your system so that every app you have that runs audio can behave in a predictable and specified way when you use it. Its a really elegant program and very useful, but when you try to use it while attempting realtime audio tracking in something like Live, it apparently introduces some irreducible audio delay into your recordings. So I turned off Loopback, and now the audio recordings on perfectly in time. Again.

Not a Live problem.

But Live's audio engine is susceptible to a lot of potential interference from other things running on the system. In addition to the Loopback issue I just described, other issues I've seen include the Mac's background indexing for its Spotlight instant search function causing weird pitchy glitches in my audio, requiring me to turn off Spotlight indexing. On older Macs, running fast Thunderbolt peripherals can also mess with the audio.