Ableton Live Device Delay Compensation

[pppppppppp]

Hehe, so Live sound will be the desirable vintage sound of tomorrow. How true maybe.
Nice tracks by the way. May i ask you what you are using for production/arrangement/mixdown?

I doubt my tracks will be any lot better "with fixed PDC" (they are ok for me), but i dislike the way ableton is (apparently not) taking care of such issues for years what i read. Demoing Cubase for 2 weeks now, but i would miss some aspects of workflow. On the other hand, Cubase Artist would be nearly same priced as an update to L9 and L9 does not have any features i really need, mostly using 3rd party plugs. The reason considering this for me is a simple one: i often get stuck in session view changing my songs much too long; i would think a linear sequencer would force me to get forward. Anyway, a bad excuse putting that on the tool, i know

Cheers, Pete

[V0RT3X]

Anyone know if PDC affects Operator, Analog, etc?

[twolegstoneworks]

Hehe, so Live sound will be the desirable vintage sound of tomorrow. How true maybe.
Nice tracks by the way. May i ask you what you are using for production/arrangement/mixdown?

I doubt my tracks will be any lot better "with fixed PDC" (they are ok for me), but i dislike the way ableton is (apparently not) taking care of such issues for years what i read. Demoing Cubase for 2 weeks now, but i would miss some aspects of workflow. On the other hand, Cubase Artist would be nearly same priced as an update to L9 and L9 does not have any features i really need, mostly using 3rd party plugs. The reason considering this for me is a simple one: i often get stuck in session view changing my songs much too long; i would think a linear sequencer would force me to get forward. Anyway, a bad excuse putting that on the tool, i know

Cheers, Pete

Thanks. I mainly use Cubase 6.5 for my tracks, but very recently I got Live for sounddesigning purposes, but that's a different story.

[tooneba]

Isn't it that Live's mixer permanently calculates the latency of the plugins at the end of the chain no matter how the plugins are on or off as long as the plugins exists in the chain? It will avoid audio gap between the on/off. But even if the latency is altered by turning off them Live won't/can't compensate it since wrapper/rack doesn't have a feature to add pseudo latency.

[billcarroll]

live's pdc is completely broken. It works as far as syncing the music, but will throw all automation out of time, it does not compensate automation, nor visual playback.

Furthermore, if you say insert a plugin with delay on track 1, and then have an instrument even on track 10 that is not in the same signal path, there is latency of that plugins value when you play your midi keyboard live. Add more in a chain and problem is compounded.

It's serious and almost ruins a lovely piece of software.

I learned a bit more today about unreported latency in Ableton Live using the LFOTool scope and offset features.

From what I can tell, at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz Ableton Live adds somewhere close to 480 samples (about 11 ms) of latency for every 3rd party plugin you put on the track even if they have no latency. This is true if the plugin is turned on or off, and the number of samples seems consistent.

If you add a plugin that adds latency then you have the latency of the plugin, plus the 480 samples Ableton seems to add for every 3rd party plugin.

For example, create an audio channel using a clap or something with a clear transient, add an instance of Pro-Q 2 in Linear Phase "low" mode which has 3072 samples (about 70 ms) of latency at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. If you drop in an instance of LFOTool after Pro-Q 2 and turn on the scope, you will see the offset. Then set LFOTool offset to -3072 and you will see there is still uncorrected offset. Add -480 samples to LFTool offset for a total of -3552 samples and you will see the unreported latency is fully corrected.

[penguinfromdeep]

Wow, that sounds crazy! It's a lot of extra latency, surely this can't be right?! I'm Ableton user myself and would surely like to see the pdc issue fixed, but this extra latency is something else now ..

[billcarroll]

Wow, that sounds crazy! It's a lot of extra latency, surely this can't be right?! I'm Ableton user myself and would surely like to see the pdc issue fixed, but this extra latency is something else now ..

I'm about to do a video on the issue. The scope and offset features in Xfer LFOTool are really useful for checking and correcting unreported latency in any host. Ableton just happens to be the most problematic when it comes to unreported latency.

[hibidy]

See, for the way I use live, I don't run into anything that is this bad. I realize that I'm a pretty simple user though.

Hosts bum me out. There are so many that have good features, but work badly in many situations.

(obligatory "it's not the tools, it's the user" post to happen soon )

[Tronam]

I learned a bit more today about unreported latency in Ableton Live using the LFOTool scope and offset features.

From what I can tell, at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz Ableton Live adds somewhere close to 480 samples (about 11 ms) of latency for every 3rd party plugin you put on the track even if they have no latency. This is true if the plugin is turned on or off, and the number of samples seems consistent.

If you add a plugin that adds latency then you have the latency of the plugin, plus the 480 samples Ableton seems to add for every 3rd party plugin.

For example, create an audio channel using a clap or something with a clear transient, add an instance of Pro-Q 2 in Linear Phase "low" mode which has 3072 samples (about 70 ms) of latency at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. If you drop in an instance of LFOTool after Pro-Q 2 and turn on the scope, you will see the offset. Then set LFOTool offset to -3072 and you will see there is still uncorrected offset. Add -480 samples to LFTool offset for a total of -3552 samples and you will see the unreported latency is fully corrected.

This additional latency introduced with each successive VST or AU plugin is equivalent to one buffer of your sound card. Some may not notice this behavior because they run their sound card at really low latency settings like 64 or 128 samples. For me who usually runs a 512 buffer to keep CPU usage low, it gets noticeable pretty quickly. Even just adding one VST plugin automatically doubles my latency to 1024. The native devices don't suffer from this latency penalty.

[billcarroll]

I learned a bit more today about unreported latency in Ableton Live using the LFOTool scope and offset features.

From what I can tell, at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz Ableton Live adds somewhere close to 480 samples (about 11 ms) of latency for every 3rd party plugin you put on the track even if they have no latency. This is true if the plugin is turned on or off, and the number of samples seems consistent.

If you add a plugin that adds latency then you have the latency of the plugin, plus the 480 samples Ableton seems to add for every 3rd party plugin.

For example, create an audio channel using a clap or something with a clear transient, add an instance of Pro-Q 2 in Linear Phase "low" mode which has 3072 samples (about 70 ms) of latency at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. If you drop in an instance of LFOTool after Pro-Q 2 and turn on the scope, you will see the offset. Then set LFOTool offset to -3072 and you will see there is still uncorrected offset. Add -480 samples to LFTool offset for a total of -3552 samples and you will see the unreported latency is fully corrected.

This additional latency introduced with each successive VST or AU plugin is equivalent to one buffer of your sound card. Some may not notice this behavior because they run their sound card at really low latency settings like 64 or 128 samples. For me who usually runs a 512 buffer to keep CPU usage low, it gets noticeable pretty quickly. Even just adding one VST plugin automatically doubles my latency to 1024. The native devices don't suffer from this latency penalty.

Thank for that info. Now the number makes more sense. I was close, kinda.

[billcarroll]

Thanks to Tronam for the info re: latency added being equivalent to the buffer size.

Here is the amended post.

At a sample rate of 44.1 kHz Ableton Live adds latency equivalent to your buffer size for every 3rd party plugin you put on a track. So, if you run a 512 sample buffer you get 512 samples (or 11.6 ms) of latency for every 3rd party plugin you put on the track, even for zero latency plugins. This is true if the plugin is turned on or off. Native devices don't suffer from this latency penalty.

If you add a plugin that adds latency then you have the latency of the plugin, plus the 512 samples Ableton adds for every 3rd party plugin.

For example, with a Ableton Live set at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and running a 512 sample buffer, create an audio channel using a clap or something with a clear transient. Then add an instance of Pro-Q 2 in Linear Phase "low" mode which has 3072 samples (about 70 ms) of latency at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. If you drop in an instance of LFOTool after Pro-Q 2 and turn on the scope, you will see the offset. Then set LFOTool offset to -3072 and you will see there is still uncorrected offset. Add -512 samples to LFTool offset for a total of -3584 samples and you will see the unreported latency is fully corrected.

[penguinfromdeep]

Well it kind of sucks yeah this is prone to cause all sorts of issues in your mixing

[Orga]

If I delay the channel will this compensate for the added latency?

[billcarroll]

If I delay the channel will this compensate for the added latency?

Using track delay in Ableton will change the output timing of the track. In other words, the timing of the track against the other tracks as it hits the master channel. Using track delay in Ableton will not change timing inside the plugin chain on a track. The unreported and uncorrected latency issue is inside the track plugin chain, not at the track output so to speak. Audio from the output of each track comes back into time at the master channel.

If a plugin that adds latency is inserted on a track, it will delay the audio to the next plugin. Most hosts report this latency to the plugins on a track, and correct for the latency. but Ableton does not report this delay to the plugins in the chain. This unreported latency causes plugins to bang away thinking there is no latency, and the plugins that need latency reporting from the host are then out of time. This causes a mess and often compromises intended use of the plugins.

In a related issue, the unreported latency also affects automation. If you write automation and then insert a plugin that causes latency, Ableton will not correct automation previously written for the added latency. Result is your automation is now off by the number of samples introduced by the plugins that add latency.

[BDeep]

What's ironic is that in Ableton's "suggestion list" on the beta pages, proper PDC is mentioned, but it's not the most popular request by far. "Tagging Plugins by Category" is on top with 63 votes, PDC comes in only a page later (well outside the top 10) with 26 votes....