A few thingz


Joseph Basquin


07/10/2024

#ableton


The definitive guide to Ableton Live's delay compensation and reduced latency

(A small "Note to self" post, while producing music)

Two options are often misunderstood in Ableton Live: "Delay compensation" and "Reduced latency when monitoring". Even after watching many tutorials, blog articles, videos about this, it might still be unclear.

The best way to clearly understand what is going on is to do this small experiment (do it, it takes 2 minutes and you'll understand this once for all!):

Options > Delay Compensation

Options > Reduced Latency When Monitoring

"Keep Latency" buttons

This new Ableton Live 12 option seems pretty interesting, I haven't tested it yet. To be written.

Buffer Size, Input Latency, Output Latency, Driver Error Compensation, Overall Latency

This is documented everywhere, so I won't reexplain this in detail. About Driver Error Compensation, Overall Latency, see end of next paragraph.

Note on monitoring IN / AUTO / OFF setting

 

Why do I always have cables everywhere?

An improved Launchpad for Ableton Live

The Novation Launchpad is a great controller for Ableton Live, especially because it allows you to play / jam / record without having to look at the computer screen.

Except for one thing: you can play a clip, record a clip, stop a clip... but you cannot delete a clip. This limitation can be annoying, because sometimes when playing with your synth/guitar/whatever you need to record many takes before having the right one, and you also want to be able to immediately delete the bad recordings. Strangely, this was not possible with the Launchpad (now possible with Launchpad Pro, but it is more than twice as expensive).

So here is a "MIDI remote script" (just a little .py file) that you can copy in C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live 10 Suite\Resources\MIDI Remote Scripts\Launchpad (for Windows, or the equivalent folder on Mac), that adds this feature to the Launchpad: the bottom right button will be a "delete the currently selected clip" button.

Bonus: this script also transforms the last row of the Launchpad into "stop clip" buttons, which is quite useful.

Download: MainSelectorComponent.py

Enjoy!

PS:

Low latency audio on a Windows PC with the built-in soundcard

Update: if you're into sampling or beatmaking, here is how to remove drums from a song!

 

So you want to use your music production software, with low latency on your PC/Windows laptop?

You have basically two options:

Michael Tippach's ASIO4ALL is incredibly useful for the PC music community since more than 10 years, because it turns your cheap computer's built-in soundcard into a low-latency one! With ASIO4ALL, you can plug a MIDI keyboard and play piano or synth with no "delay". Without it, the delay of more than 50 ms between the keypress and the sound makes it nearly impossible to play.

But ASIO4ALL has one major drawback: it's not multi-client. This means that if your DAW is open with ASIO4ALL as sound driver, then, if you open:

... then it won't work: the audio is not available for them: your DAW and ASIO4ALL have locked your soundcard.

This is really annoying and I can't count how many hours of my life I wasted since 10 years to find a solution for this (every few months/years I retried and retried and benchmarked every new method). (Ok switching to Mac would have been a faster solution...)

The real difficulty is that we would like to use

Setup (1): A music software in ASIO + a standard application like Firefox using the so-called Windows WDM driver

Here is a list of things I tried, unsuccessfully:

Now, promising solutions:

Now, a working solution (update 2019):

Interested for future evolutions and other (audio) tools?

 

 

My blog – Joseph Basquin

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I create products such as SamplerBox, YellowNoiseAudio, Jeux d'orgues, this blogging engine, etc.

Articles about: #all, #music, #opensource, #python.