Ableton Forum

I've tried to search an answer for this without luck. If there has been another post on this, please direct me to it.

Here's the issue -

Open up a new set in Live 6, monitor the audio input of an instrument (guitar for example) - latency is as low as soundcard is set, totally fine.

Open up a fairly large song with many tracks (but playing back fine), latency is unreal. Like a half a second. Not just on monitoring, but the audio is out of time if you record it, forcing one to move the start marker for that clip to try and bring it back in time.

No plugins on the input track in either case. No settings changed in between. This is really odd, and something I never experienced with v5. I'm using a dell laptop and focusrite saffire, but I seriously doubt it's a hardware issue because it is totally dependent on the size of the live set without making any changes to hardware prefs.

Let me know if you can point me in the right direction.

The following may be related to the issue....take a look at these:

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... &start=225
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59800

The second of those posts does seem to be dealing with the same issue, but it looks like there was no resolution. Can it really be that hardly anyone records audio into Live sets that have more than a few tracks? Its hard to imagine how this is a usable DAW for tracking at all if this is normal operation.


I'm suprised this hasn't been talked about more. I take it there is no solution?

You'd have to wait until one of the Abe's is up and about for a confirmation but afaik there currently isn't. However the issue you're describing as regards latency during recording does strike me as a bit hardcore - do you track with monitoring on thru the program or can you do it directly from your audio hardware Genome? I'm not familiar with the Focusrite box but I'd imagine you could....

Personally when recording from 'outside the box', ie: guitars, vox etc, I'll always just use direct hardware monitoring as Live's, alongside it's whole PDC MIDI monitoring shambles as outlined in the lengthy first link, just doesn't work for me. Certainly with this method I've never found myself having to move recorded audio takes 'back into line' as you describe and I've produced tracks with 50+ channel counts.

Well I am trying to record by listening back through the program, and I have no trouble doing this on a new set, or one with very few tracks. However, without changing any settings, I open up a song with 30 tracks and the latency is huge.

I can use hardware monitoring, but the reason that's a big bummer is that I like to record guitar tracks while monitoring through Guitar Rig, that way I'm just recording DI and can finalize my sounds later. So in order to use hardware monitoring I'd be listening to DI guitar (sucks), or having to run an amp/amp sim externally to monitor through & record a second track of DI. (That still doesn't fix the fact that the tracks are recorded out of time).

I didn't want to go into that for fear of confusing the issue and having a bunch of suggestions about plugin buffers/delay comp, etc. This is something that happens on a track without any plugins, listening directly to audio input through the program. Small set = fine. Big set = massive latency.

Sorry to hear of your woes Genome....personally I keep all my guitar stuff 'out of the box' and, if I have my way, it's never going in it I'd wait until one of the support Abe's is up & about to answer you...Amaury has confirmed, in the thread I linked earlier, that CPU jitter vs latency is being worked on - whether this is directly related to your issue requires confirmation from them and, hopefully, some solution.

(I very much hope that the Abe's sort these core issues, alongside what was raised in the aforementioned epic MIDI thread, for Live 7 and place them at the very top of the feature list come the release announcement. Otherwise, as has been stated in other threads, they will be losing customers and I'd hate to see that )

Just so you know, I'm in NZ.. so I'm not up in the middle of the night pulling my hair out or anything.

FYI - I just tried recording some audio with monitor set to OFF and this audio was not delayed when played back. It seems like this has been the case with the other thread about midi latency too if I'm not mistaken.

Hi,

Audio latency should not be subject to the amount of tracks in the set. What can make a difference is the number of plugins on the monitored track's routing path, and in the set if some specific routings occur.

So:

-Do you have plugins on the Master track?
-Does the track you are recording route to another track?

You can try starting a communication with [email protected], providing these informations:
http://www.ableton.com/pages/support_contact

Regards,
Amaury