Ableton 12 Finally Fixed their Latency Issue!! 

yes, that is by far the best feature in live 12 for me

No way? This has been around still all these years? Damn i remember back near ~2005 when I was testing various DAWS, this was a major deal breaker for my setup and workflow and ended up using Cubase because i didn't get this problem. Wow. Nearly 20 years later 😮 its finally addressed.

Finallyyyyyyyy! Thank you for sharing!

I’ve been searching for ages for a tutorial like this! Thank you very much!

Super helpful, was looking for this

Wow super cool, funny this didnt get much or any buzz at all as it was frustrating af. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for this! Succinct and informative.

Best tutorial yet. I thought I was going crazy with this compared to how logic does it automatically. In Ableton you have to fix it yourself. Like a child. Can they not fix the code to do it. Geez.

Thank You! What a great video.

Excellent. Thank a lot dude!

this is dooope thanks man!

Added this to my Ableton must have tips playlist

Ooo, the video I’ve been looking for!

Nice thanks for this. This is a must-watch IMO. Finally in 2024 this is fixed!

Clear explanation, Thanks

Thx for the explanation man.

That was useful. Thank you.

So many useful revelations, thank you!

I am very grateful for this video. Thank you for explaining the latency issues and how to resolve them in 12. As an aside, I remember being in a discussion on the Ableton forum over 10 years ago where the whole thread was exactly about this issue - i.e. Ableton Live would "compensate" for latency by adding its own delay instead of letting users work out how to deal with it best for themselves. It is the absolute worst implementation of dealing with latency I have ever come across. None of the other DAW's I have used (Reaper, Cubase, Logic) had this stupid approach. Not only is one, as a musician, trying to deal with latency whilst recording, but now you have Ableton doing a completely counter-intuitive thing that messes up the recording process even further. But what really blew me away was the arrogance of the Ableton tech guy trying to explain it away on the forum, saying that, actually, this process was "better" than what literally every other user suggested - he was obviously parroting what his bosses told him to say. I came within in an inch of giving up on Ableton right then and there as it was abundantly clear that Ableton was more interested in protecting their ego-invesment in going down this path than listening to their users... and the sheer arrogance of that didn't bode well. Even now, that they have finally implemented an option that should have been implemented years ago, it blows me away that their traditional approach is the default and one has to dig through multiple menus to choose the more sane option. I wish Ableton would get out of their own way sometimes.

Bedankt! Goeie video!

Thanks, did not know!

finally!thanks for the tip.

I would not have thought of that

Steinberg with Cubase managed to solve this problem with ASIO Guard like loads of years ago

Great video, thanks! I do however think it's a better solution to compensate for midi latency using the External instrument device rather than fiddling with the track delay.

Thanks❤

I've always used the external instrument feature on a midi track for this and then had an audio track taking in the audio from the ext-instrument track. Has the advantage of compensating whilst playing back the instrument in-synch live, before recording. Keep latency seems possibly more useful for tracking recording of acoustic instruments...?

Wow , finally!

Damn, why didn’t the ableton support telll me, that I’d just have to turn monitoring off all those years? also awesome feature for me in live 12, finally

yes finally!!!!!!!!

Latency was the main reason i left Ableton Live. I was really sick of it. Between all those DAW alternatives i decided to give a try on Reaper and i was amazed that it can do everything that every major DAW's do, it is fast, light on CPU, really really flexible and adjustable, it have major community support, many many of good freebies and it doesn't have that really annoying latency problem no matter how many heavy plugins you put on a track and i use the default DAW settings. I'm still on Reaper DAW ever since.

Live 12 and still no PDC fix? PDC at its current state is why un-knowledgeable Live users claim it sounds worse then other DAWs. Its not the audio engine, its the PDC not doing its job!

Hey man thanks for sharing! I have a question: sometimes when I create a new track and record the audio from an existing track, the dynamic range of the recorded audio is different from the original audio. Do you know why? It can happen during resampling too, even after I turn off all the plugins in the master channel.

I can't believe they finally did it.

Live 12 should be free, latency fix is not a feature and what they offer in the upgrade is not an upgrade, it’s an update. That’s why I switched daw and not going back to ableton

Hi do you know if Push 3's audio interface has 'direct monitoring' integrated? I'm using it to record vocals and when I monitor my audio in for recording I still get that slight doubling sound. The recorded audio is fine as you'd expect. So how can I monitor my vocal whilst singing without the doubling using Push 3 as my interface? Great content btw 👌

I was using driver error compensation since live 10, had to manually dial in the latency in ms

Ableton will add an additional sample at bounce as well (if your session is 48kHz and you bounce you’ll have a 0.02 ms delay on each track, it’s annoying especially if you work with timecode)

I found a trick ....I create a duplicate track set to IN then record first track set to OFF, this gets me results i can cancel out (perfect render) ..im still in 11. soo anyone else using 11 this will work for you, same idea. Also I would freeze/flatten the midi-track if your going to use it to check against the recording.. Midi just the trigger, sound might have a later start time, who knows. Thanks for the info, nice video

Try using an external instrument ableton device, I think it's the proper way to record synth

use resampling

Hey thanks for this video! Do you know how to turn the 'ms' button (next to keep latency) yellow? Mine are grey in Ableton 12. Thanks!

It's still 'broken' in a sense because when I use Cubase for instance, I don't have these types of issues that I have when I record hardware synths in Ableton. This is definitely an improvement, but they need to find a better way to manage delay compensation.

Thanks for an epic video - I implemented immediately. I noticed you have been replying to answers in the comments, so I thought I'd chance my arm at asking a question, if you have any insight or ideas. I Send CV clock from Ableton to start my modular synth. (I use the Expert Sleepers ES9 interface, and the clock starts my "pamela's new workout" module.) I do not use midi. I record my audio tracks back in to ableton via the same ES9 audio interface. While your video has massively helped reduce the recording latency, I am still seeing around a 12ms delay when recording. Have you any idea how I can make it so the kick drum (and all recordings) line up on the grid, without the delay? I would love to be able to mix in audio samples from ableton into my performances, but due to the recording latency, the ableton tracks are never in time. Many thanks to anyone who may be able to point me in the right direction.

Yeah i record my external synths totally different. ive always used the external instrument device and just dail in the delay on that device. I then save that external hardware device as a preset so its ready to go for any session for delay free recording. Each of my hardware synths has its own external device setup and saved in Ableton so i can just drag the device onto an audio track and go.. each synth or hardware effect has different latency settings depending on different variables. Like i run some of my stufg through an ADAT and some through my main interface, they both have different latency. I just save that latency delay setting into the external audio device plugin and also the audio I/O. I never record my external audio through the actual channel input like you have here, i have over 24 channels of I/O so i would hate to be constantly sellecting which channels i want. It takes a little work to set up and save individual external audio effect plugins as presets but once its setup its super quick and easy .

My thing with Ableton is it got live at the end of there name it's suppose to be the best when comes to live sets yet u can't use it live with out big problems

It was a bug and should be repaired in version 11. This is the main reason I switched to bitwig and it was the best choice.

For easy audio/midi/fx in synch everything with everything , use Ableton as slave machine /as master use a hardware seq with minimal clock MIDI PPQN 480 ticks... ENJOY

Why logic can create a low latency knob that allows you to record midi without latency and ableton can not? think about it

So the latency setting in the midi preferences is redundant?

What about "Reduce Latency when Monitoring" in options menu?

and why isn't keep latency just off on default? or maybe automatically turned on when tracks are record enabled??

Is this feature available for all Ableton 12 variants?

Abelton 11 is fine here with a uad apollo but I beta tested 12 didn’t like it personally didn’t feel 250 was worth a minor update , rather get Logic 11 imo

i recently got a new audio interface ( focusrite solo), but ever since i have it my midi keyboard is pretty much useless. even on 128 samples i have a latency. its impossible to use at the moment. When playing it plays the first note when i already hit the second note and it really throws me off. I was using asio4all and i was hoping this sound card would make it better, but i am worse off then using asio4all :(.

wow

this fix is not done through proper plugin delay compensation, right?

Man, why didn’t you use external instrument device for all those years? You‘d have perfectly synced recordings all the time.

Sadly this doesn't work on my system where I'm triggering my modular synth via Clock from Ableton over USB MIDI to the FH-2 module. The only way I can reduce latency in a meaningful way is to reduce my Buffer size down to 64 or 32 (normally work at 512). At 512 Buffer I get about 87ms latency no matter what I do. What baffles me is with the exact same setup my latency in Logic is only a fraction of that in Ableton, and in fact is almost useable at 512 Buffer!

Is not easier to just record and drag the sound to de desired start?

Do you prefer to use a MIDI track instead of an Ext Inst device for external synths? If so why?

wtf how.. thx dude i was desperate

works with vocals?

I'm so glad the finally fixed this headache - only took them 12 versions. Thanks for the tip. How stable is the clock? Do you have any tips on using live with external sequencers or do I need to buy a midironome or erm multiclock?

very good tipp, btw if you use an rme audio interface, the driver error is 0 samples. rme is the only brand I know that is spot on acurate. others vary, depending on the buffer size. compensating midi latency is difficult, because it can vary and drift. this is because its a serial protocol and depends on how many midi informations are transmitted at a time.

Not an Live user I was merely curious... This was actually an issue that didn't get sorted until 2024? That's insane 😂

what about recording vocals ?

So using a P.A. or fancy speakers "doesn't make sense at all"?

Why would you want "Keep Latency" turned on?

1 step forward 2 steps back though, plugin latency compensation feels BUSTED in live 12

Why do they have the keep latency option at all? Why would anyone ever want latency?

get global sampler vst i don't use ableton but it captures live information this sounds absolutely jank , we have no problems like this in reaper

Massive W.

oh i thought this was about hardware latency.. a real issue... lol

anyone else's live 12 crashing after a few hours of work/trying to save projects etc.

It's rediculous for Ableton to say that the reason the latency is there on midi is because "with real instrument people play with slighly early timing to compensate" YEAH...we do that BECAUSE OF THE LATENCY! 🤦 That explanation makes absolutely NO sense lol because if the latency wasn't there people wouldn't have to compensate in the first place 😂. I know it's just a thing we have to deal with when playing guitars and stuff...but why add it to the midi also? We still would much preffer to not have to deal with that lol.

It's better latency compensation. There is no such thing as zero latency. If a signal moves from one place to another, you're going to have latency. It's physically impossible under normal circumstances to have zero latency.

I recall 3phase continuously complaining about that issue on the Ableton User Forum…

Anyone know why audio will be latent even with monitoring off I don’t even touch monitoring