Another Ableton noob looking for a quick straight forward answer lol (if there is one

[Tumbles]

How's it going everyone

I just got the Ableton Live Intro package, somehing cheap to get me started and see if it's for me...

I'm using a Mac Book Pro to run it..
So i'm running through the setup and I've got to the part where I've to listen to the test tone and set the buffer size, now the dropouts and clicks in the test tone stop pretty low at 50 samples but I can put the the samples all the way to 2000 samples if I want and still have a clear tone lol so should I be setting the sample rate as low as it will go, middle or as high as I can? and why?

Thanks

[Patch]

You should take the test tone as low as it will go WITHOUT clicks/pops. Slide it down until you hear clicks/pops, then nudge it up a little until the clickps/pops disappear.

[Tumbles]

Thanks for the reply, I did a bit of research last night about buffer size, sample rates etc and basically what I got from what I read was that the higher the sample rate the more latency I will encounter with midi but a low sample rate will use more CPU, can anyone confirm this is correct and if so, is there a chance I will need to change the sample rate in the future when I start doing a lot more with the program?

[Tumbles]

Not that it really matters im just curious...

[djfofo]

Yeah you could run into some latency issues if your sample rate is high, it just depends on what your computer can handle. Since you have a macbook pro, you shouldn't have too many issues with maintaining your sample rates.

[durtyjerzy609]

can some one point me to a "how to" on setting the buffer rate/ smaple rate.... ableton doesnt have anything and i cant find jack shite anywhere else... thanks

[Tumbles]

On the version i'm using, open lives preferences, click on the audio tab in the preference and you should see the buffer rate / # of samples there and also a test tone to listen to for setting the best rate for your setup... mines set at 50 samples and running/sounding good but i'm still learning the basics not running much at once, if that even makes sense lol

[Birds]

Okay well how do you plan on using it? If you're playing guitar or some other external instrument into it you'll have to think about latency a lot, but if you're only just using the internal sampling and vst synths and such, you don't really need to worry about getting the latency as low as possible.

It's also worth noting that a higher sample rate is going to actually lower your audio latency. 96000 is going to halve the latency compared to 44100, but with the cost of higher cpu load. Higher audio buffers however are going to increase your latencies, but with the benefit of preventing audio dropouts.

The way I set it, 96000 sample rate with a 512 sample buffer. That results in 12.4 ms overall latency on my MBP. If I need to record my guitar or something, I drop the buffer down to 256 but never any lower. That gives me about 7 ms overall latency, which is pretty good.

If you're only worried about MIDI latency, this setting won't effect it, so you don't have to really worry about it at all.

[Vios]

It depends a bit on what you're doing. If you're recording or using Live for live performance/DJing, having as low of latency as possible is desired because latency is the amount of delay in your audio. That means if you hit a button that changes your audio, you hear the change 20ms later if your latency is 20ms.

Now if you're like me and you use Live for production, I typically set my latency fairly high. The reason is that Ableton doesn't use the same amount of CPU power constantly when you're producing a track. It's up and down on a regular basis based on effects, samples being triggered etc. So increasing your latency increases the buffer time, and allows me to run more effects and do more processing without having audio dropouts.

The starting point is to use as low of a latency as possible that doesn't produce dropouts of audio effects in the tone. If you start getting dropouts in your audio when your CPU % use is up, try increasing your buffer size. Personally on my lowest buffer setting I can start getting dropouts when my CPU use reaches about 60%. However on a higher setting I can usually go up to 85 or 90%.