Hi all,
I have a hybrid setup with my eurorack and my Digitone 2 that gives me a bit of trouble in terms of sync and latency.
So what I in the end want to achieve is being able to record all tracks from my Expert Sleepers ES-9 AND my digitone 2 in the DAW (Ableton Live). I understand in order to do this I need to have my ES-9 as audio engine and OverBridge running on my Digitone 2 in order to be able to record all tracks. So far so good.
I am using my NerdSeq in my eurorack as clock master - I have an Multi I/O expansion that sends the clock to my Digitone 2 (through midi) via a TRS-A cable. It is super stable in my opinion.
So here’s my challenge.
My eurorack and digitone are in sync - yep - so when I take the audio master out from digitone and plug it into my focusrite all is good. But that is only audio master in 1 track being recorded from the digitone into Ableton. The challenge comes as soon as I use Overbridge to split the tracks into Ableton - now suddenly the digitone and eurorack in not in synch. Actually when looking at the audio recorded my digitone is slightly early compared to the audio from the eurorack.
So one master track from digitone + eurorack into Ableton = Yay! But as soon as I add Overbridge into the equation it is no longer in sync.
Is there anyone who has a good solution to this or am I forced to record track by track from the digitone
I had this problem a few months ago when using DTII to sequence my TEO-5, and the solution was to turn off Latency Compensation in Ableton.
I’m not sure why this is but something to do with OB having its own latency compensation and therefore the OB tracks weren’t syncing with the TEO coming direct into my interface?
If you end up with some recorded latency you can use the individual track latency settings in Live to compensate.
what’s happening here is that Overbridge introduces a fixed processing delay on its audio streams, and Ableton’s latency compensation is trying to account for it by delaying everything else to match - including your ES-9 tracks. the result is your eurorack audio gets pushed back in time relative to the OB streams, so they land out of sync.
turning off latency compensation globally is one fix but it’s a bit blunt. the cleaner approach is to leave global latency compensation on, but manually set a negative delay on your OB tracks in Ableton to pull them back to where they should be. figure out the offset by recording a short click from both sources and measuring the gap in samples, then dial that in as the track delay (it accepts negative values). that way you’re not fighting Ableton, you’re just telling it the truth about where those OB streams actually sit in time.
That is a good suggestion, for some reason in my scenario Ableton was actually adjusting my non-OB tracks (ie TEO) forward, so in some cases cutting off an initial transient (in cases where I was trying to overdub something at the start of a bar, I’d have to start recording a bar early to compensate).
Okay here is my question (new to ableton and also having this integration issue): if you use this method, is it not just adjusting the playback latency rather than the actual recorded latency? When I try this and rerecord my click samples, I can get things perfectly synced, but only by ear – the transients are visually still in the same place and out of sync. My issue with this is when editing granular drums for example, when it is really helpful to be able to look at transients and move things around.
Are you monitoring through Ableton? If you monitor any of your recording tracks it can mess up latency. Monitor through hardware if possible, or use a separate audio track for monitoring - but your record track(s) need to have monitor set to off.
I also found that using external instrument plugin hardware latency slider is more effective than the track latency slider.
Record two bars of clicks, zoom in on a click in the second bar, you can select the latent area between the click and the beat, bottom of the screen will give you a number in ms, say its 3ms, that’s your latency so you type -3ms into the delay field in ext instrument or track delay. Doing it by ear is great for jamming but it’s not very precise. … it takes a little trial and error but you can get it dialled in as precisely as possible this way.
Oh - and if you are recording any tracks through and interface, did you set up hardware error compensation? The settting is in preferences>audio, and there is a good walkthrough included in Ableton - open the help window and you will find a topic about hardware error compensation near the bottom. Do that before you do any other latency adjusting.
