MIDI Delay with Ableton not evenly distributed

[Favaski]

Hello everyone,

After having read many topics and followed tutorials about how to sync hardware with Ableton Live 9, I still can't configure my Sub 37 properly.
My problem is that the latency between the note sent by my "External Hardware" track in Ableton Live and the audio recording is different by each recording. I also noticed that the start position of the track has an influence on the delay value. Unfortunately if the delay is not constant, I simply can't fix it with a simple value typed in the "Hardware Latency" option, and I've not found any topic similar as my situation.

I'm running windows 7 64 bits with a Line 6 UX1 as audio interface.
Please have a look at the attached picture which illustrates what I explained previously: three different recordings of the same note, with Monitoring turned to "OFF", which bring to three different delays.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[ImNotDedYet]

That's jitter, not latency. Try to get the latency down, and don't record immediately after starting playing in Live. Let it go for twenty to thirty seconds if possible so the clocks can get sync'd. Also, set your audio buffers as low as possible, which will help with jitter in Live 9. USB will tend to have a bit more jitter than DIN, so if you're using USB, have you tried USB?

[Favaski]

Thanks for your reply. Your method seems to work accurately when starting the recording from beat 1 with 30s waiting time till the first note, I get roughly 5 ms constantly with the lowest buffer settings (128).
Nevertheless I'm still facing jitter if I start recording from somewhere else (but always on a beat start), even with 1 minute waiting. I guess I'll have to deal with it, my cheap audio interface and Live which is not considered the best when it comes to MIDI syncing can also be an overall reason. By the way is 5ms an "good" value or can you get much better results with your gear (without talking about external MIDI clock) ?

What I try to get all things considered, is the most effective way to work with the synth in a heavy arrangment. For me it inevitably implies that we have to work with bigger buffer sizes when messing around a sequenced pattern with the arrangement playing to find a sound that fits and therefore endure unpleasant latency before we want to record it by setting the buffer size smaller for optimal latency. Or did I miss some obvious trick?

[ImNotDedYet]

Another thing - turn monitoring off on your track. Just listen to the audio from the soundcard, not through Live. This may help with some regards.

I've done a bunch of research into MIDI sync lately, and according to my research, Live is actually pretty solid when it's configured correctly. There are expensive alternatives out there like Expert Sleepers and GenSync I believe is their name? They require a dedicated audio input and MIDI slot, and they cost around $1000 USD, so...