Hi everyone,
Apologies in advance as I know sync topics are fairly tedious, but totally bamboozled by what I’m finding here, and think I’ve landed on a solution that some other Overbridge users may benefit from (albeit am expecting I’m missing something obvious…)
TLDR
Dealing with latency issues, bought a Multiclock which didn’t solve them. Ended up clocking everything via AR midi out, synced via Overbridge, with some offsets for devices streaming audio through audio interface. It’s performing better than the Multiclock at what I thought the Multiclock was going to fix for me…
Longer version
Background
My situation:
- Use Ableton live, AR MK2, DFAM and a mono synth.
- Was previously clocking DFAM using CV tools at the end of my master track in Ableton, using AR MK2 with OB and mono synth using external instruments.
- This setup worked totally fine for me, all latency compensated, everything on grid no matter what I threw at my Ableton setup. I monitored through Ableton and have been able to put latency heavy (Pro-L2) plugins on my master track without any issues at all in this setup.
- I wanted to sequence the mono synth and DFAM in more fun ways so I bought a Torso T1 and this is where the fun started with sync issues and latency…
I’ve since come to understand External Instrument in Live will compensate notes for latency, but not clocks, so the Torso is being messed up by all those latency heavy plugins I had on my master. I can workaround this for the Torso by removing those plugins. Not wanting to compromise I ended up getting a deal on a Multiclock under the belief this would sort my issue but sadly not so…
I’m fairly sure I have configured the Multiclock correctly. It’s syncing to my DAWs tempo, starting after a bar as expected. I am able to get things in time playing with offsets and the like but if I add a latency inducing plugin then I need to resync, which wasn’t what I was expecting. In addition through the Multiclock I’m finding that the first note received is early relative to the rest of the notes, despite the Multiclock starting at a 1 bar delay - I wasn’t expecting this. I understand part of the benefit of the Multiclock is eliminating jitter and offsetting multiple devices but none of that was what I needed, I just wanted to eliminate the latency issue.
I started this post looking for help with the following questions:
- Is it expected behaviour that a latency inducing plugin on the master track will cause the Multiclock synced devices to fall out of sync with my DAW when recording in?
- Is it expected that I have the first note arriving early relative to the others?
- The big question - if the answer to 1 is yes, why is Overbridge the only approach I can find that seems totally immune to this issue - whatever I throw at my project it is always locked in sync and dynamically updating.
Solution?
Typing this out has helped me quite a bit as it got me thinking. Now I’m trying to clock my Torso from the Rytm, with the belief/hope that Overbridge will deal with all of the latency compensation for me. The only residual issue is that Overbridge audio and the audio running through my interface suffer different latency amounts. My understanding is that this should be a fixed offset, and I can allow for this via the External Instrument.
I’ve just been trying this and it’s solid (+/- 2ms which I’m happy to live with). I’ve tried this with buffer size ranging from 32 samples to 1024 samples, and thrown a bunch of latency inducing plugins on multiple tracks. I’ve power cycled my whole setup and tried again, still good.
Conclusion
This almost feels too good to be true given I’ve never read of people using Overbridge for this purpose. In addition Multiclock is always lauded as the holy grail of fixing sync issues, it seems very difficult for me to believe that this doesn’t deal with latency inducing plugins as I’d have thought this very commonplace. I’m almost sure I’m being an idiot and misunderstanding something here.
What am I missing?!