Octatrack Recording Latency

horrrsing · 2023-03-29T09:08:18.619Z

Hey Guys,

I’m pretty new to the OT game so right now I’m having a fight with a Dark Souls like boss: Latency. My only real issue is a slight recording latency, when recording stuff from Ableton’s external instrument. Everything is being recorded a bit late when the OT is clocked via Ableton. I’ve already tried to mess with the latency settings in Live but that didn’t do the trick. Do you have any suggestions?

melisshki · 2023-03-29T11:51:28.091Z

Only other thing I could think is that your audio interface is affecting it?

darenager · 2023-03-29T16:25:15.007Z

Try setting OT sync internal, transport external, and match OT tempo with your Ableton tempo.

Schnork · 2023-03-29T17:25:45.577Z

Are you sending midi from OT to Live and then send the audio into OT to sample it or are you sampling stuff that’s sequenced from something other than OT?

I sequence softsynths inside Live from my OT and sample into OT pretty much daily, no issues with that.
But as @darenager mentioned, OT is not synced to Live. I just match the tempo. One of the best things about OT is that you can easily capture loops that are perfectly in time.

If you are sequencing from within Live or from another hardware seq, I guess it would be best to put the midi notes into OT and don’t sync either OT to Live or Live to OT, but just match the tempo.

You can use live recording mode to let OT record incoming midi, but then you’d have to send start/stop from OT to Live or vice versa (or start both manually and correct the recorded midi by hand) and then switch it off for sampling.

Midi involving hardware sequencers and daws isn’t flaweless, depending on individual setups it can work well, though. Especially when you have an ERM Multiclock, Expert Sleepers USAMO or something similar.

Overbridge works very well for distributing clock and start/stop from a daw to other gear. If you have an Overbridge supported Elektron, you could use it to sync OT to your daw, but for sampling softsynths I’d just sequence from OT and match the tempo. Much, much easier and faster, because when you load more effects or use a different softsynth, latency increases or decreases. There are so many variables you don’t have to worry about when sequencing from OT.

If the midi is complex, maybe it would work to resample it in Live and then load the audio into Simpler/Sampler. Then trigger playback from OT (C3 note plays the sample at original pitch, a C3 in Live is C4 in OT? Or was it C5?), send the audio to OT and sample it. That way you won’t have to put all the microtimings, velocities etc. into OT by hand, but still have the playback synced by sending a midi note to Live.
I never tried that, just something that came to my mind…might be a good solution.

horrrsing · 2023-03-30T08:59:48.929Z

Thanks! Will try this today!

horrrsing · 2023-03-30T09:40:11.621Z

Well the problem occurs when recording audio directly from Ableton into the OT. I didn’t had any problems with Midi so far but thanks for the reply!

Schnork · 2023-03-30T09:54:04.575Z

horrrsing:

Well the problem occurs when recording audio directly from Ableton into the OT.

So you have just an audio clip in Live and synced via midi?

Then maybe my little trick with putting the audio into Simpler/Sampler and triggering it from a midi track in OT might work. Set up a recorder trig on step 1 and an audio track and a midi note on step 1 on a midi track in OT. Then OT should trigger the playback of the audio in Live and at the same time sample the audio.
No midi sync.

When you do this and still have latency issues, how is your audio interface’s buffer size set?

horrrsing · 2023-03-30T10:39:15.971Z

Interesting idea! The buffer size is pretty low… around 64-128

Schnork · 2023-03-30T10:50:09.434Z

That should definitely be low enough. I think you can even trigger audio clips with midi notes (and play them chromatically), forgot how that’s done. Dragging audio into Simpler/Sampler would achieve the same thing. I don’t think my OT ever had problems capturing perfectly timed samples when I triggered the playback with a midi note.
I think I actually already did trigger a long audio clip inside Simpler/Sampler (gotta love Sampler’s fm section^^) and sampled into OT.

I usually have a thru machine set up to monitor the incoming audio from the daw (nice way to check before sampling how fx, modulation etc. will sound and also things like latency) and then change to a flex track when I want to sample. I place a recording trig and a sample trig, so that the flex machine automatically plays the sample after it is recorded.

Changing machines keeps all the trigs, so it’s a nice and fast way of testing out things and then capturing them.