to_the_sun

At times I seem to be measuring a lag upwards of 9 ms when simply sending MIDI from one track to another via the normal routing system in Live. This is the sort of unpredictable latency I would expect from using send and receive to get MIDI messages from one device directly to another. Is this actually to be expected? The measurements were taken using cpuclock in devices in each track.

lag-between-2-routed-midi-tracks-lag-using-sr-between-devices

Notice that the latency behavior of Live was recently changed/improved.

https://www.ableton.com/en/articles/live-9-beta-release-notes/

Oh I see. I assume you're referring to this sentence

Live Sets that contain Max for Live devices or third-party plug-ins now have lower latency.

under 9.2B1 release notes? That's a positive thing to read. Still, as a very general sort of question, midi sent between two routed tracks should be consistently faster than sending the same data directly between send and receive, right?

The reason I ask is simply that using send and receive would be a lot easier, but I want my devices to be as tight as possible so I've been attempting to be tricky and encode certain messages directly into the MIDI stream, thereby getting them from one place to another in what I assumed was a generally faster channel. I'm not wasting my time am I?

This statement from release notes 9.2.b2 is also interesting.

"The latency introduced by a device is now displayed in the status bar, when hovering over the title bar with the mouse."

But regardless of the latency amount, with standard routing all tracks will play in perfect sync due to Live's plugin delay compensation (PDC). Extra routing via s/r is not included in PDC and may thus lead to timing issues.

Yes that is quite interesting. I signed up for the beta but I haven't installed it yet.

Thank you for the clarification. What I saw as a delay must've been due to some idiosyncrasy on my end, possibly in the way I was measuring (which was actually with the date object not cpuclock), which I thought it might have been, so I decided to post.

Lag between 2 routed MIDI tracks ~= lag using S/R between devices?