Lowest Possible Midi Lag Ableton Tips for Achieving Optimal MIDI Performance

Lowest Possible Midi Lag Ableton Tips for Achieving Optimal MIDI Performance

In order to help users achieve optimal MIDI performance with Live, we have provided a list of
recommended practices and program settings.

•Use the lowest possible buffer sizes available on your audio hardware, thereby keeping
latency to a minimum. Audio buffer controls are found in the Audio tab of Live‘s Preferences,
and vary depending on the type of hardware you‘re using. For more information,
see the Lesson “Setting Up Audio I/O.

•Use a high quality MIDI interface with the most current drivers in order to ensure that MIDI
timestamps are generated and processed as accurately as possible.

•Do not enable track monitoring if you are recording MIDI while listening directly to a hardware
device such as an external synthesizer (as opposed to listening to the device‘s audio
through Live via the External Instrument device). Likewise, disable track monitoring when
recording MIDI data that is generated by another MIDI device (such as a drum machine).
When monitoring is enabled, Live adds latency to compensate for playthrough jitter.
Therefore, it is important to only enable monitoring when actually playing through.

•The DirectMusic architecture on Windows allows outgoing MIDI events to be scheduled
by the operating system rather than scheduled by Live alone, so performance may differ
depending on whether or not you‘re using MME or DirectMusic mode. If you experience
timing issues, we recommend switching to the other mode. This is set in the MIDI Ports list in
the MIDI/Sync Preferences.

33.6 Summary and Conclusions

Ableton wrote this paper in order to help users understand a variety of related topics:
•the inherent problems in computer-based MIDI systems;
•our approach to solving these problems in Live;
•additional variables that we cannot account for.

As mentioned before, the best way to solve MIDI timing issues in your studio is to use the highest quality hardware components available. For users of such components, all software MIDI systems
should perform with no noticeable issues. For users with less-than-optimal hardware, however,
Live still offers an additional degree of accuracy by minimizing jitter, but at the expense of
a small amount of additional latency.

We encourage you to refer to this paper if you have any questions about Live‘s approach to
MIDI timing, but we also encourage you to contact us14 if you have additional questions or concerns
that we haven‘t addressed.

*sources 
Ableton Manual 
http://www.ItchyTastyRecords.com