I know this is a topic that has been touched on many times but I just can’t seem to find an answer anywhere. I want to record an Octatrack project to my mac, recording each track separately, one at a time. I have to Ableton transport locked and synced to the OT. I record each track, when recording I put the Ableton metronome on just to see if its recording in time. It is playing in time, but the recording is slightly delayed, im guessing thats just a latency you get?
Anyway, I think its fine I’ll just get the starting point of each recording and line up the first beat to its relevant position on the grid. Doing this should mean the track will land on the grid, playing its set tempo the Octatrack project was. However this isn’t the case, the tracks will play in time at first but slowly drift ahead of the Ableton grid, playing before it should be. Why / how is this possible? I don’t get why, considering the recordings were played at exactly 130bpm by a machine, the timing doesn’t stay in grid after aligning the first beat? Technically it shouldn’t be possible for this to happen, why is it happening?
Is the only way to fix this to manually warp the recording to be in line with the grid? Or am I overlooking something obvious here?
I had this too, since I figured that I could simply only sync the OT’s transport to Ableton Live and set OT to the same tempo as Live. Then when you fix the start, the rest will be right too.
I also testet this with a bit longer recording to see if the tempos “stay in sync” and they do pretty well…it might be a bit off when you record minutes this way, but for a loop of even 32 bars it will be very very accurate.
Just fix the start afterwards and that’s it
EDIT: what you are observing is the normal midi-drift which just happens when gear is synced via midi. The slave gis fluctuating in tempo while overall staying in sync with the midi-master.
Ah thanks for explaining it and your workaround. So the erros in timing won’t happen if there is no midi sync in the first place?
Do you know if there is any way to fix these issues in already recorded stems, or would this be a case of going into each one, one by one, and warping it to the grid like that?
well, if your midi is working correctly than those time-shifts are caused by the midi-drift, so yess.
But I don’t know of any other way of fixing the recorded stems without a) warping them or b) re-record with only transport-sync enabled and same tempo in Live and OT.
