Once you get your midi clock settings sorted and your synth/drum machine sounds perfectly tight, you go ahead and hit record and, urgh, the recording is delayed.
Its vital in Ableton that if you are monitoring your audio through Ableton itself, when you come to record you need to switch the “Monitor in” setting to “Off”
Lots of people I’ve spoken to don’t realise this.
When you record with “monitor on” then Ableton will apply the Plug In Delay compensation latency to your recording. The latency of your recording will vary depending on how many latency inducing plugins you have running on your project.
Just thought I’d share this, might help someone struggling.
From the manual :
### Why are my recordings out of sync?
If the track monitor is set to “In” or “Auto” and you start recording, the recorded audio or MIDI is played back using the exact same timing and placement as what you’ve played. Depending on how large the buffer size or sample rate is, and how many latency-inducing devices are in the set, the recorded notes or audio could be offset in relation to the rest of the clips in the set. If you’re playing in by hand then the difference is usually not so perceptible as the timing will already be quite loose in feel. However if you’re recording from a fixed source (eg. a hardware synth playing a quantized pattern, or a drum machine) then the offset will probably be quite noticeable. In those cases we recommend setting the monitor to “Off” instead.
When the monitor is set to “Off” then Live compensates by offsetting the recorded material by the exact amount in the “Overall Latency” section in Audio preferences.
Good shout man, the monitor settings impact on timings eluded me for years. And to be honest, if I haven’t live recorded something in a while, I might still forget
When monitoring is set to “In” or “Auto,” the “Keep Monitoring Latency in Recorded Audio” option will be enabled by default. This adjusts the timing of the recording to match what is heard through Live’s monitoring. Generally speaking it is recommended to leave this option enabled when recording software instruments or effects, and to switch it off when recording acoustic instruments or relying on external monitoring. You can right-click on the “In” or “Auto” monitor buttons to manually switch “Keep Monitoring Latency in Record Audio” on or off.
Yeah just read that. My support/documentation/former teacher brain immediately dislikes the use of “acoustic”, because I assume it is not precise and could cause confusion for novices.
Would assume “acoustic” has nothing to do with it, and “external” everything to do with it.
Edit: As an aside, if this is something you think would improve your work flow, but you were underwhelmed by the live 12 updates, and this alone isn’t worth it; check out the newest beta release note offerings, a lot of good stuff.
So ridiculous it took this long. This should have been the default way it worked from the beginning. I struggled for years with this before I understood it, thinking my playing was just bad, eventually just warping and quantizing everything to fix it. Then I learned about latency compensation and thought that would fix it but it doesn’t.
I can’t understand why anyone would want to record the latency. The explanation I heard is that you’re supposed to compensate your playing based of what you hear which sounds insane to me. I listen to what the other instruments are doing and then my hands play what I want to hear, I’m not going to listen to the delayed sound and then learn to play slightly ahead of the beat to compensate for it. So stupid.
Does this also count for making a stereo recording demo/p-mstr etc? So not a multitrack to work on further within ableton but a “final” recording as it were.
You would want to make sure all your live instruments are recorded in and bounced to audio before making your final full mix recording. I wouldn’t trust even this new function to do it personally without checking first
