New in Ableton and facing delay

[Giooo]

Hi All,

new here and happy to join the community.
Just got Appleton Live 11 Lite along with a Scarlett solo.
I know there are tons of post like this but I didn't find a solution yet.

The best working configuration I found using the Scarlett as both IN and OUT is:

Sample rate 48.000
Input buffer 256 (5.33 ms)
Output buffer 3800 (79.2 ms)

which leads 84.5 ms and it makes absolutely impossible to play live electric guitar using any effects.
My PC is a i7 24 GB RAM and SSD disk.
I've tried the Focusrite on my office MacBook Pro with M2 and with Garageband and I faced no delay at all, so I can exlcude defects on the Scarlett.

Any guess? Or as I'm startin to guess Ableton can't be used for live sound modeling...
Thanks
Gio

[yur2die4]

I am really confused by those buffer settings. Why are they set so high? 256 is okay, but if you can get away with 128, that’d be great.

Too low and your audio will get hit at various moments. So it is good to see how low you can get it, put it to the test with your usual usage, and see if you hear any crackling. Then raise it and try again.

It should not be more than 256 for live performance.

[Tarekith]

Lower your output buffer, there's no need to ever run it that high. If you are unable to lower it, make sure your using the latest driver for the Scarlett.

[Giooo]

Thanks for the help.

RE input buffer: if I change to something less than 256 then Ableton immediately corrects to 256 samples
RE output buffer: I manged to go dawn to 475 samples, below this threshold audio drops start

It seems there is no option to input less than 256 on Windows PC, unless there is another setting that I haven't found.

Scarlett and Ableton are freshly installed, with latest drivers, CPU usage remains always very low (indeed the PC can easly play AAA games).

Made some more experiment on MacBook that has only a single buffer option for both IN and OUT, there I can select 32 samples and NO audio drops.

I'm really starting wondering if this SW can handle live sessions on Windows, did any of you managed to do that?

[Angstrom]

I feel like OP has not set the driver in Windows to ASIO. I don't have different settings for input and output latency. Obviously if I click "hardware settings" it opens my audio device control panel (in my case MOTU) but my system waltzes along like this:

[yur2die4]

Yeah. I think I overlooked the most simple questions.

1. Did you make sure to install the drivers for your hardware? They should be available at the manufacturer site, and will allow you to adjust settings of your hardware through the driver software.

2. Are you making sure in Audio Preferences that you are using the ASIO drivers? Those are the most stable and flexible for using Live. Definitely don’t do this step unless you’re sure you’ve take. Care of the first step. Then there is a Hardware Setup button like in Angstrom’s posted image.

[cids]

Ableton will use the Windows settings see here:

https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/ ... in-Windows

[Giooo]

Hello folks, eventualy got some spare time from work and made some more tries, eventually ASIO wasn't set by default and works perfectly once changed the driver to ASIO!
Thanks a lot for the help solving that!

[Tarekith]

Excellent, glad you got it sorted.