Ableton Forum

I've been using my laptop to record some songs. To date I've been using the built-in sound interface and recording with Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Due to various limitations, I purchased an M-Audio MobilePre USB interface. As it happens, Live 1.5.3 Delta came bundled with it. It looks pretty cool, but...

I've been having a LOT of trouble getting anything I record or import to sound right. Everything sounds distorted, "electronic" (sort of like it's flanged), and otherwise really bad. It's the same for .wav files that were recorded with Audacity and even music files ripped from a CD.

Now I've figured part of it out. If I get out my metronome, listen to the .wav file, and set the tempo before I import the .wav file I can get it to sound pretty good. Using the same method I was (once) able to get things setup so I could record my guitar and have it sound OK. But in general I can't get it to just record what I play.

I tried something different today. I plugged in a radio to my MobilePre (testing the idea of moving my cassettes to CD) and did some playing around with Live. I found that the direct monitor from the MobilePre sounds fine. But the monitor from Live has the usual problems. I tried setting the Tempo to that of the song being played, but that didn't fix it. Of course when I recorded the incoming signal the results had all the same problems when played.

So, what am I doing wrong? How do I setup Live so I can simply record some input, be it guitar, vocals, or whatever?

Thanks.

sounds like your either experiencing latency, or you have both the direct monitoring (listening to you guitar/casette/etc. in real time, not going into your computer) and the monitoring through Live on. When you have both of these on, the flanging created is due to the latency between when you hit a guitar note and the time it takes to go into and bask out of live to your speakers--when this sound and the real-time sound of the direct monitoring mix, the phasey nasty flange sound happens.

Anonymous wrote:sounds like your either experiencing latency, or you have both the direct monitoring (listening to you guitar/casette/etc. in real time, not going into your computer) and the monitoring through Live on.

I can see how both of those could be problems while I'm recording, but I wouldn't think the would apply to playing back something already recorded (especially something like a track ripped from a CD).

On my test today (recording a radio signal) I specifically turned off the direct monitoring because I noticed two distinct signals in the system (direct and Live's monitor).

So I guess one question is: could latency effect playing back a recording, and if so, how should I figure out what to set it to.

If latency isn't the problem, then I'm still looking for some other suggestions.