Ableton, all plugins cause *automation* pdc issues, very good discussion within.. lots of info!

[Spiritos]

Yeah, I tried it now with loop off and made a new pattern with different sounds and indeed there's no way around that..

How awfull and dealbreaking this might be I'm still thankfull the PDC-issue has been clarified to me in a really graphical way now. I'm amazed how people could not have been bothered with this and I disagree with the statement this being a rather extreme situation. It's as basic as it gets regarding automation.

[Crackbaby]

It might be so you only notice it by your project suddenly starts to sound bad but you don't know why. Maybe it's the notes, maybe it's the reverb .. or maybe it's just a little out of sync because of this issue.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[mkdr]

What?!
That sounds too absurd to actually be true. No. No. I don't believe it. It's a modern host. It can't do a thing like that. Wtf?

[ezelkow1]

you didnt have to go through all this trouble, theres many posts over on the ableton forums you could have just copied that show this with various screenshots and explanations

The easiest way to show it was using cableguys volumeshaper since it displays its waveforms in time. You can just line up 2 of them on separate tracks and take a screen shot and visually see them thrown off, it was something to that effect that easily showed it

in the below, i duplicated a kick track between tracks 1 & 2. both have a volumeshaper on them (used only for the scope view here). a reverberate (w/4096 sample latency, but set to 100% dry, so no effect at all) was put into one of the tracks. the top volume shaper (on the right) is the original track, second one is the one with reverberate in the channel. you can see a significant delay between the two here; it clearly is not coming on the midi click. You can also see this on the top two channels of the oscope (which are in the channels, so 'see' the latency where they are).

However... I put an audio scope on a send (with both channels sending 100%) and the master (bottom two channels). You can see that in this case, ableton lined up the two tracks, and while they still aren't synchronized to the midi beat (they have an offset), they are synchronized to each other, mix together correctly and look the same. i didn't do utility but this is not a single sample offset; it would look massively different if they were being mixed offset from each other.

i just want to completely understand this issue correctly. The tempo sync one in particular is very bad; you can always shift automation around to get it correct, but there's no mechanism to shift around the midi clock. It is technically in sync with the tempo, but the start phase will always be off.

thread:
https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php ... 4&start=60

These are more about showing the lack of PDC for tempo syncing though, but the same generally applies, both tempo sync and automation are not compensated for, only audio is. In a scope like above, the waveform will appear out of sync as shown in the volume shaper, however the audio ends up compensated for. The automation and tempo information will not though. So thats what throws off any tempo-synced plugs or automation vs. the audio you are seeing and hearing

-edited for the better example pic and explanation

also to quote andy from cytomic for his explanation in the previous kvr thread where it came up:

I've just done some investigations in the song position information and automation in Live 8 (which is the DAW that I use and love). I believe that knowing what is going on is always useful, so hopefully this will help you adjust your automation and manual delay compensation so you can get sample accurate results when using Live 8.

I added a 20khz sine wave to a new project and inserted 3 plugins: The Drop then two copies of The Glue, all on the same track. I set up The Drop to use song position information to trigger the synced LFO and make sharp stabs once per second in the audio. The host temp was 120 and I froze the audio and copied it out each time (a very cool feature!) I then moved the position of The Drop to second in the track and repeated, and again in third position.

What I found is each vst / au plugin (not inbuilt Live ones) before the one that needs song information / automation generates a single audio buffer size block of latency, which results in the song position and automation getting passed to the plugin a multiple of the audio buffer size block early. I double checked by setting the audio buffer size to different amounts and repeated the steps.

So the formula is:

song position and automation advance in samples = (number of 3rd party plugins on track before the one that needs sample accurate song pos and automation) * (audio card buffer length)

and if there is extra latency introduced by linear phase oversampling then the formula is:

(edit: in the below, I have changed "audio card buffer length" to "plugin buffer size", which defaults to "as audio buffer" but can be set to something different, so it is the one that is needed for the forumula)

song position and automation advance in samples = (number of 3rd party plugins on track before the one that needs sample accurate song pos and automation) * (plugin buffer size) + (latency of all 3rd party plugins on the track before the one that needs sample accurate song pos / automation)

So if you have sharp automation then you have to delay the steps position by a number of samples that dependends on both where the plugin is in the chain and your audio buffer size, so if you change either you'll need to update your automation as well. I hope that helps!

PS: the automatic PDC in Live 8 works perfectly, it nulls with two tracks in parallel, so any latency introduced by linear phase oversampling is completely corrected for. The above only refers to automation and song position information being sent to plugins (and possibly midi being sent to effects plugins not first in the chain too, but I've not checked into that so I don't know for sure).

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... &start=120

[Wormhelmet]

Weird that I always gravitated towards clip automation and using the built in plugins. Honestly have minimal issues in Live and sounds great. To me that's what Live is for. Playing live and making loops and automating controls in the clips themselves, then record your session and tweak from there.

I suppose if all I wanted to do was track things out and automate everything, I would gravitate towards a different DAW. Tracktion, Reaper, Cubase, Sonar, Studio One, Logic, or the like. Live is more like an instrument than a DAW to me. Just an instrument with a ton of features.

I'm sure Ableton has known about the PDC problems for a long time.

[Echoes in the Attic]

A couple minor points to add that OI don't think have been brought up here:

-Max for Live devices work the same as third party plug-ins, that is, they latency according to the audio buffer.

-Before Live 9 there was a separate "Plug-In Buffer" setting in the preferences, so you could actually lower your plug-in buffer separately from your audio buffer. The default setting was "As Audio Buffer". But you could have this very low, like 64, while having your audio buffer higher, like 512, thus helping avoid the latency issue without destroying CPU. (Side note, this did not apply to Max for Live devices, these have always followed the audio buffer). In Live 9, they removed the plug-in buffer seting from preferences and set the plug-in buffer as audio always. They do allow this to be altered in the Ableton prefs text script though. So it's been relegated to a minor hack.

Did I mention that Bitwig confirmed Delay Compensation to work properly?

[JoeCat]

I have now gotten into the happen of bouncing everything to audio before midi gates, filters, etc. First noticed this using the (awesome) Sinevibes plugs...

Interestingly, some experiments I did (I posted a video or two but have since deleted them), showed problems with early timing depending on the delay compensation settings, but that may have been a bug in the plugins themselves (don't recall if I used Sinevibes or not). I had no idea the audio buffer affected this - thanks to all for figuring that out!

In any case, I re-bounce any audio using midi effects and automation to see if the timing is correct. A real buzzkill.

Don't see how this does not affect live "Live" performers, many of whom use midi-timed effects all the time. Got to play with a Push the other day but I'm rethinking it...

This is an important issue for many producers and I don't understand the posters making light of it. It's great that Andy (Cytomic) has come up with the calculations for a workaround, but at some point the work involved detracts from the creative experience. And if HE's aware of the problem and Ableton isn't fixing it, there's little hope.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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[V0RT3X]

A couple minor points to add that OI don't think have been brought up here:

-Max for Live devices work the same as third party plug-ins, that is, they latency according to the audio buffer.

-Before Live 9 there was a separate "Plug-In Buffer" setting in the preferences, so you could actually lower your plug-in buffer separately from your audio buffer. The default setting was "As Audio Buffer". But you could have this very low, like 64, while having your audio buffer higher, like 512, thus helping avoid the latency issue without destroying CPU. (Side note, this did not apply to Max for Live devices, these have always followed the audio buffer). In Live 9, they removed the plug-in buffer seting from preferences and set the plug-in buffer as audio always. They do allow this to be altered in the Ableton prefs text script though. So it's been relegated to a minor hack.

Did I mention that Bitwig confirmed Delay Compensation to work properly?

so they DID confirm this, no jokes? (bitwig)

the other two were definitely already covered, but thanks anyhow

I think i did see that somewhere, and it was a official statement from a bitwig employee.

[chroma]

theo - thanks much for the exhaustive analysis! that's way more than what i did before (in that ableton thread

so... inserts on group tracks solve the problem? that is really odd, will have to try that.

[twisted-space]

Another way to show the issue here. The image below shows where I have to put the automation to mute the second hit, using reverberate with 8192 sample delay.

[Mushy Mushy]

Another way to show the issue here. The image below shows where I have to put the automation to mute the second hit, using reverberate with 8192 sample delay.

Cant you just use clip automation instead?

[Echoes in the Attic]

A couple minor points to add that OI don't think have been brought up here:

-Max for Live devices work the same as third party plug-ins, that is, they latency according to the audio buffer.

-Before Live 9 there was a separate "Plug-In Buffer" setting in the preferences, so you could actually lower your plug-in buffer separately from your audio buffer. The default setting was "As Audio Buffer". But you could have this very low, like 64, while having your audio buffer higher, like 512, thus helping avoid the latency issue without destroying CPU. (Side note, this did not apply to Max for Live devices, these have always followed the audio buffer). In Live 9, they removed the plug-in buffer seting from preferences and set the plug-in buffer as audio always. They do allow this to be altered in the Ableton prefs text script though. So it's been relegated to a minor hack.

Did I mention that Bitwig confirmed Delay Compensation to work properly?

so they DID confirm this, no jokes? (bitwig)

Yeah I think it was one of their facebook posts:
"Good question! Bitwig comes with Plugin Delay Compensation. And what most people want to know: Yes, it also compensates the plugin delays for the automation as well as for the VST-timing."

the other two were definitely already covered, but thanks anyhow

hmmm, you must have temporarily forgotten here:

HOWEVER, *all* Max4Live effects add a latency.. the precise amount i am unsure of but i think it's 1.5ms per plugin.

It's audio buffer per max audio device. No latency for midi devices.

Hadn't seen any mention in your summaries about the hidden plug-in buffer setting which you can still access in the options file. It can be an important solution for some. Anyone new to Live 9 wouldn't know about it.