Numerology 2 and Ableton Live Sync timing issues

[sonsofthehounds]

Love the software and am keen to purchase if I can fix this issue of timing lags I am getting on inputting midi into live. Seems as if there is a 20msec lag on everything midi and audio included. Is there someway this delay can be eliminated? I am on Live 6.0.7 and N2 beta on a intel macbook 2ghz. The sequencing alone app is incredible tho and just what i am looking for but need to rewire it into live for my projects. Any help with this is much appreciated...

Is the rewire driver causing this issue? I know I read in another thread that it was best to delete it and you can avoid hassles with start up order of apps?

cheers.

[jim]

There will always be a small delay, but I am working on ways to reduce it, as well as provide some user control.

Here is a rough overview of what happens when live is running, from the point of view of rendering audio & midi:

- Live gets a render call from the audio driver to produce a buffer of audio samples.
- Live renders its stuff, and at some point during that, calls Numerology's ReWire driver to render its stuff.
- Numerology does its render, and queues up any generated MIDI events.
- These MIDI events go to the OS X Midi Server and then to Live's MIDI Input queue.

According to the CoreAudio Team, the latency of the Midi Server is very small (a few nanoseconds), but more likely than not, Live will not actually process those Midi events until the next render cycle, thus causing a delay.

My tests indicate that it is usually equal to one or two audio buffers. You can think of it as being a bit like a plugin that has some delay (like a UAD card), or like using a hardware synthesizer in combination with software synthesizers.

You can reduce the delay by using a shorter buffer, and you can compensate for it by putting a very short delay on other tracks -- I generally use the ExpertSleepers BufferDelay for that.

When Numerology generates MIDI messages, they all get a 64-bit timestamp, which allows them to be accurately scheduled. I'm working on an advanced preference that will allow you to adjust the generation of those timestamps to improve the timing. It will not be a magic bullet, but will give you a bit finer control over things.

Another option that may work, depending on your setup, is to use MIDI sync and host a few AU's in Numerology. That would eliminate the delay completely. BTW: I'm pretty sure 10.5.6 (released yesterday) fixes some issues with MIDI Clock, I will verify that this afternoon.

Cheers,
Jim