Ableton Forum

I recently purchased a Focusrite Saffire interface for recording my DJ sets in Ableton Live 6. The sound is being routed from the master out of my DJ mixer (Digital) into the Saffire then on to the DAW. (Ableton running on Vista dual core Athlon x64). I'm having a problem with latency when monitoring the source in Ableton causing an echo when i try to record. Also about 75% of the time the sound comes in clear but the rest of the time it has a "crunchy" sound at best and a weird digitized interference type of sound which lowers the volume and distorts highs and lows making the audio almost unrecognizable. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. I'm also using Serato Scratch if that helps.

Echo?

So this DJ mixer is receveing sound from where? Turntables, or your computer?

Using turntables with Serato Scratch.

So you've got Scratch sending audio out of your soundcard, which then goes back into Live? COuld be your echo is a feedback loop.

Make sure Live isn't monitoring audio on the same physical outputs as Scratch. See if using analog inputs helps (esp. with the intermittant noise issue). Too bad you can't ReWire scratch into Live.

Oh, I forgot to mention Scratch is running on a seperate laptop about 5 ft. away, so the source is similar to any other instrument. But digital (supposedly) could this problem be caused by interference with wires? or maybe a CPU issue. I didn't have this problem when the setup was plugged directly into the desktop's onboard sound card. And i'm not using anything too CPU intensive. It's a pretty powerful computer with a good amount of hard disk space

Two laptops?

well, details help.

I doubt some mystery cable interference is the culprit.
But I wouldn't bet against your SPDIF cable causing a problem. Try a different one. You are using a spdif cable, right? Or are you using an RCA audio cable?

RCA. I'm not sure if my mixer has spdif capabilities

cellstarmike wrote: The sound is being routed from the master out of my DJ mixer (Digital) into the Saffire

So are you using the analog outputs or the digital outputs?

You wrote digital so I assumed you meant digital... and since the saffire has digital inputs (spdif) i made a further assumption.

Well, I'm probably not going to be much help, but perhaps a few details of your setup will help others to help you.

Thanks for your time Laird. Hopefully someone is using a similar setup.