A few thingz


Joseph Basquin


08/12/2024

#music


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?

"Since"

A song I made a few months ago.

Join/Leave · Since

"Comme un ciel sans nuage"

Here is some 80s-cheeeeesy French pop I made with Gaëlle W. :

Joseph83 & 2Things - Smile (They Said)

Here is a song I composed and produced in London with the songwriter and singer Natalie Mitchell.

"The songs about
people hurting u
but just pretend to be happy
and it may work just smile."

 

Available on Spotify.

 

Here is the music video:

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?

 

 

“Marianna & Joseph - Run, Hayley, Run”

Voici une chanson écrite avec Marianna Kosch, enregistrée à Paris en 2017. Ambiance 80s synthpop!

Many thanks to Hayley Connaughton for the artwork.

“Ocean Souvenir”

I made this song in collaboration with the American singer Faint Peter. I came up with the synth riff and drummachine, as he made the vocals. From Seattle to Orleans or vice-versa.

Run away

Thanks to Les Inrocks for featuring our song in their selection ❤️

Two years ago, Robbie, myself and the American singer Dyllan released the song "Run away". Sometimes magic happens in the studio (Juno 106 was there...).

Happy to share our song here, also available in LesInrocks Labs:

My blog – Joseph Basquin

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Available for freelancing: Python expert / R&D / Automation / Embedded / Audio / Data / UX

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

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