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RE: Ableton 8 Looping problems



 

There are a lot of choices for audio hardware depending on your

preferences, but one thing is absolutely required: an ASIO device

driver.  You don't usually get an ASIO driver with built-in audio

hardware which is probably why you had high latency.

 

On a modern machine you should be able to run smoothly with a 128

sample block size.  There will be one of these on both the input and

output sides for a "round trip" latency of 256 samples or 5.805

milliseconds at a sample rate of 44.1K.

 

The general belief is that latency below 10 milliseconds becomes very

difficult to notice as long as it stays fixed.  Even if you do notice,

it is usually possible to adjust your playing style to compensate just

like you do when you play with a monitor speaker more than 6 feet

away.  Accoustic players may be more sensitive to this.

 

The actual ASIO block size you can use is dependent on many things:

the speed of the CPU, the amount of memory, the applications you have

running at the same time, the firewire chipset (if you use a firewire

audio interface) the graphics card memory, etc.  If the block size is too

small the system won't be able to keep up with requests from the

hardware and you will year "clicks".

 

The important thing to understand is that latency isn't some fixed

quality of Ableton or the audio hardware, it is something you tune to

be as low as possible for your combination of hardware and software.

It's sort of like finding the highest stable operating speed of a car. 

 

If you've got a machine less than 2 years old with carefully selected

components and you've been careful about what software you have

installed then a 128 block size is to be expected, and I've

seen some go as low at 64.  I've never heard of 32 under Windows

or Mac.

 

If you've got a 5 year old machine with under 1GB of memory and a

lot of software installed then you might have problems getting that

without a lot of tuning if you can get it at all.    

 

Jeff

 

From: CM [mailto:listmail@asyouthink.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 3:00 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Ableton 8 Looping problems

 

I've been thinking about making this same shift myself (from Repeater + Ableton-as-non-recording-loop-player to Ableton-as-live-recording-looper).  On a standard laptop sound setup w/o special audio hardware (just as a test bed) the latency was too long for my taste. My old desktop rig has an old Echo Gina card / break-out box, but is ancient hardware (PIII, believe it or not); haven't tried it there yet. I'm planning on upgrading this machine though.

What are most Windows folks using for the audio hardware these days, and what should be typical good/expected latency times w/Ableton?