Newbie question: latency with Ableton Live
Home > Home Recording Forum > Recording Techniques > Newbie question: latency with Ableton Live
Posted on Jan 11, 2010 12:15 pm
Steve_Law
Member Since: Jan 11, 2010
Hi,
Got my wife to get me a Lexicon Omega audi interface for xmas, and hooked an electric guitar to it last night. I can play guitar straight into the Omega and listen to it on headphones, yay.
I also installed the ASIO drivers for Ableton onto my laptop (a fairly new Dell Latitude with dual core 2.4ghz cpu and 3.48gb of ram) and was able to record some twiddling onto an audio track, and also to play it live (without recording but with the audio track "armed") and hear it back through headphones connected to the front of the Omega.
However if I added one of the built-in Ableton guitar effects there was about a half-second delay before it arrived in the headphones.
Is this something I just have to live with, or should I be able to tweak Ableton to minimise it? I assume there's always going to be more latency with software emulated effects rather than hardware.
Is the problem that I'm listening to it through the Omega box, and I should be directing the audio tracks output to the laptop sound card and thus cut out the return to the Omega - would that make a difference?
Thanks,
Steve
[ Back to Top ]
Jan 11, 2010 12:22 pm Welcome to HRC.
I don't know much about Ableton personally, so I can only speak in theory, but it seems to be logical that the guitar effects of Ableton are simply too much for your PC...which I find surprising.
I'd suggest a couple things...first, pull up the system monitor and watch the CPU usage...when you open the guitar effects does it peg? Also, do the guitar effects have a way to turn each different effect/control on and off? For example, if you are not using the "delay" (or whatever) can you turn it off? If so, that may save some resources by turning on only what you are using.
Jan 11, 2010 12:49 pm Hi! Thanks for your response.
I'm just trying to get a benchmark of what to expect. When you say you find this surprising, would you generally expect such a setup, with software-supplied sound effects, to work without excessive latency?
As I say it is a decent laptop, so I'm not expecting that to be the issue.
I'll check the cpu usage tonight and get back to you.
Cheers
Jan 11, 2010 12:53 pm I am surprised because your laptop appears to have plenty of power to run what you are saying you are running.
That being said, it depends on the guitar effects...if it opens up by default with every effect on it enabled lots of power could be taken. Effects like reverb, if it's part of the plug, can use a lot of resources...if you can disable it, it would save those resources.
Some effects require more processor than others. Spacial effects like reverb, do A LOT of math, takes a lot of processor...though you seem to have plenty.
Do you maintain your laptop well? clean garbage files, defrag, and that sort of thing? Do you have much running in the background? If so, disable some of that stuff...instant messengers, PC health scanning tools and crap like that.
CptTrippsCzar of Turd PolishMember
Since: Jun 20, 2006
Jan 11, 2010 01:19 pm ASIO buffers would be my first thing to check. Thing is, using abletons guitar models is going to make things tough.
Instead of going into your system, having ableton see it, and then sending back to your interface for monitoring. You are now sending, having ableton process it (where your latency is coming from most likely) and then sending it for monitoring.
You will either need to drop your ASIO buffer as low as possible (on my old layla setup 64K was the highest I could go without making the latency problematic) or apply the modeler after tracking.
Jan 12, 2010 08:24 am Hi,
I played about last night and RTFM'd and managed to reduce the latency to a workable amount, even with ear-bleeding guitar effects enabled in Ableton.
There's an Omega control panel button where you can move a slider to use more cpu and decrease latency (but increase the chance of pops and clicks) or less cpu to increase latency but decrease the chance of pops and clicks. Giving it more cpu did the trick.
What's going on there though? I've gleaned that increasing the buffers increases latency, but that's increasing memory rather than CPU, surely?
I also found a CPU section in Ableton Preferences where you can modify the "Plug-in Buffer Size", giving options of 32, 64, 128, 256 etc as mentioned by CptTripps above. This didn't seem to have any effect either way. Can someone enlighten me as to how this is different from the CPU option above?
Sorry if these are Ableton specific questions, I'm a newbie and don't know whether these features are common to all software or not.
dB_Masters, thanks for top tip about cleanign up the laptop. I'll create a new hardware profile and cut out all the non-essential services etc too, so Ableton has the maximum resources.
Jan 12, 2010 08:29 am I can't say much about those Ableton settings, cuz I don't know and I wouldn't want to midlead...I will say this though regarding cleaning and organizing your PC.
There are two freeware apps that are nice to use routinely.
www.ccleaner.com
www.mydefrag.com
These will clean all the garbage out of your PC, temp files, cache, empty recycle bin and that sort of thing, and also help uninstall apps and clean your registry...MyDefrag is just what it sounds like, a good defrag and optimization application.
