Ableton Forum

So on many occasions I've noticed severe latency with midi controllers when I have alot of plugins (audio-units and lives native) in a live set, and with most of them deactivated.

On these occasions I've attempted to mess with Lives prefernces buffer values and came to the conlusion that the buffer values aren't even working at all. Setting the buffer at 64 is EXACTLY the same as setting it at 2048.

So I'm wondering if os x possibly has some kind of built in automatic buffer feature that is overiding Lives? Is there something like that that even exists in osx's built in audio midi setup?

I've tried with all of my audio interfaces and the same problem persists.
Korg zero4, Kore controller's AI, and with the Macbook pro's built in output.

Also regarding the latency when there's a bunch of deactivated plugins sitting in a set: I thought that since Live 6, they designed it so ONLY if audio is running through a plugin Will it tax the cpu or ram. Am i wrong about this?
If thats the case then I should be able to have hundreds of deactivated plugins in a set and never notice any latency difference.

This latency that I get not only effects midi keyboards, controllers and such, but it extends to the spacebar and qwerty keys on my laptop causing a great lag between hiting space bar and audio starting (and when stopping-also producing an audible hiccup).

Your latency settings are for audio latency; they have nothing to do with MIDI or QWERTY keyboard control...

If you're having lag issues like that, I'd look somewhere else than your buffer settings.

ew

Oh , Yea you're right.

Where am I supposed to look for midi latency values?
As I mentioned before, Is there something built into os x that I'm missing?

EDIT:
So I discovered something interesting while building a new liveset template from scratch. While adding more samples and one shots to a single track, mapping them to a keyboard, and then adding additional scenes I suddenly noticed that something had flipped and my midi latency all of a sudden was something absurd like a half a sec. long. I deleted, one by one the tracks , then all of the fx in the set and it didn't help. Has to be a bad bug.
However, closing Live and restarted it, seamed to temporarily fix the problem. But I did notice it happened one other time when I opened that Live set after having a diff. set open. Weird.

I had a similar issue a while ago. It was a very large set. Came and went without reason. Never got any solution could not consistently replicate the problem. I think in the end I severely reduced the set as much as possible. Haven't had it happen since, thank goodness.