Understanding Ableton Buffer Size and Latency

alright Joe how many times have you been here oh all the notes are super late I'm putting my finger down Oh Oh all but the actual notes that I'm hearing are much later than what my fingers are doing oh cool what this problem is called as latency now we can fix this though to varying degrees depending upon your computer system depending upon how big your set is and how much CPU you're using the kind of hardware that you're using but mostly we're going to fix it by looking at Ableton's preferences and adjusting the audio interface buffer size all right so we're going to go up here to preferences and we're going to look at this latency area right here okay so in terms of latency let's talk about buffer size I think the best way to describe what buffer size is is let's think of the let's think of your audio stream as kind of your internet speed and your your your bandwidth of your internet if you have a slow internet you're trying to watch a video on YouTube for example you can see on YouTube the playhead as it's going through a video as well as how much of the video has been loaded okay and so what happens is that with more and more with a faster internet connection you have a bigger buffer or a bigger extra amount of available video that's already been loaded so that your playhead never runs into problems so what I have right now is I have this focusrite scarlett 2i4 I have the buffer size as high as it will go for this and the reason I did this is that my computer is really fast in order to get these anomalies in order to get this high latency this huge delay oh oh between when I put my finger down Nicole I need to turn my buffer size way up some people the depending upon your system will here this buffer size issue at for example 512 oh so I've set my buffer size down to 512 I know I can still hear that and in fact I'm going to set my samples back to to the highest setting that are the buffer size to the high saying 2048 samples and now I'm going to turn up the microphone on the camera so you can hear the difference in real-time and then what's happening with my voice do you hear that is it a tissue oh oh oh so the way that we fix this is we reduce of the advertised and until what's happening in computer as well going into computer IRA where I'm painting on we may need a little bit of a latency chain as we herded us down so 128 samples it sounds like my voice is pretty close and now as a musician I can handle that amount of latency I can handle that that's not too much okay so what I want to do is I want to get down to the very scientific exact amount of buffer size that will yield you the highest amount of of performance versus the amount of latency that you get and that's what you're looking for so let's go ahead and let's learn how to use this test area to to dial in exactly the right settings for you the first step in using this is set the buffer size on your audio interface at its medium setting like 512 is what the scarlet starts out I mean most interfaces will just default at 512 okay then the next step is you want to drop drop the volume of the test tone all the way down you don't want to fry yourself or your speakers or whatever you're listening through the next thing you want to do is you want to set the CPU simulator all the way up to 80% right here okay and you can change the tone to be something nice and pleasant not around 390 is a good place to go now you turn the test tone on okay and you increase the volume you turn this headstone on and I'm going to turn on my microphone of the camera so you can still hear my voice so you increase the tone volume until you can hear it into that tone volume it's just crystal clear okay as I decrease my buffer size depending upon of the former here each UML the lower you go you'll start to introduce problems in the audience because of the feed of my computer I'm only going to hear those problems at their they're worth right there okay so okay so what those are what those clicks are are interruptions in the audio stream the computer wasn't able to keep up with how fast the the buffer size wasn't big enough to keep up with the audio stream but at that lowest setting at 32 samples per Bowl we have close to zero latency but unfortunately what we're going to run into everyone to our audio hiccups so when we're trying to record audio and other things it's not going to sound right we're going to get clicks and pops and our recordings okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what might happen if you have a slower performance computer I'm going to remember we were talking about sample rate in the last video I'm going to turn the sample rate all the way up to 96 thousand okay so we're back at 96 thousand the highest audio quality using the highest amount of CPU and drive space that my computer can handle so now I'm going to turn my test tone remember turn the volume depth first I'm going to turn my test tone on okay and we're going to switch to the camera mic return the the test tone on and I'm going to go down in samples all right so let's go down to 54 [Music] there's some places off look good I'm sorry as you can tell the more you're trying to squeeze out a computer CPU was the more of these errands you're going to get okay so I'm going back to 512 24 one all right so I know that I'm going to probably hang out around this sample rate for these lessons in this area so I'm going to set my buffer size at the lowest rate that I can safely know that I'm not going to get any audio or text and that's at one point it's a good balance between no latency or very low knowledge that I can't tell or feel and a good audio stream knowing that I'm not going to run into errors for a vocal bull all right so that's buffer size depending upon your computer and your computer's capabilities you can set this at different levels and get it's going to be different for every single system every single computer every single combination of interface and computer and higher quality interfaces can streamline your audio stream and make it a the latency is going to change for each one it's really important that we set this to the right level and I should also add that if you're working on a track that's got lots of plugins there's a lot of stuff going on there's a lot of resources being used at your computer you can increase this buffer size to higher amounts as you start to run into errors going all the way up to even the highest amounts and just if you're not in the recording phase or the playing phase but you're just in the mix down things sometimes it's good to increase these these samples in the buffer size so that you can you can edit it without artifacts you can export it without problems and so on and so forth so work with your buffer size to make it so that you're you're retrofitting Ableton to adjust to what you're doing

Channel: Seed to Stage

Views: 121,366

Keywords: ableton, latency, midicontroller, midikeyboard, abletonlive, buffersize, buffer size, ableton live

Id: npj_IPv-2Jo

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2017