I recently purchased Ableset for my Top40 Coverband and love the workflow! We’re using Ableton for backing tracks for a along time and had been using Session view before moving to Ableset.
Everything works great in a session with >70 songs and >3 hours playtime. Last night we played the first gig with the new rig and experienced one critical issue though:
Most of the tracks start with a count-in but for some of them our drummer starts the playback directly (e.g. after an intro) and this has to be 100% in time. Unfortunately there was a noticeable delay after clicking the space bar and we never had that issue when starting in session view directly in Ableton. The problem did not occur when we tried to replicate it during sets.
I will do some more testing this week but wanted to ask here if this is a known issue and maybe there are solutions to it?
Should Ableset in theory start playback as fast as starting it directly in Ableton or will there always be a small delay due to the remote/plugin situation?
But let me say this one more time: I love this thing and am very happy to having found out about it!
**OS and Version:(Mac OS ?) Intel Mac
**Version of AbleSet: 2.4.1
**Version of Ableton Live:11.?
(I don’t have the macbook at hand right now…will add more info later)
Hey @Jonas_A, welcome to the forum, I’m glad you like the app!
If you’re controlling AbleSet from within the browser on the computer that’s running Live, there should be a sub-15ms latency, mostly around 5-10ms between sending a command and Live executing it. This is a limitation with the way plugins work in Live that I can’t work around, unfortunately.
For songs that require more precise timing, I’d just map Live’s play button to a MIDI controller and use that. If you’re using Live Suite, you can also use the AbleSet Controller device and map its play button to your MIDI controller. This button directly controls Live so there’s no latency, but it has the advantage that it doesn’t do anything when you press it while Live is already playing instead of jumping back to the position you started playback from.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions!
Another thing to consider as you move your tracks from session view to arrangement view make sure that the start of the song is exactly on the first beat of a measure. If you don’t then the quantize will be off and you could experience an unexpected delay.
Thanks for your answers. I just re-visited the ableton set and can confirm the following behavior:
We use Ableset’s setlist feature to create our set and Auto-Jump to next song is activated. So after a song is finished (STOP marker) Ableset jumps to the next one in the browser list. When I start this next song by pushing the spacebar while the browser window is active, there’s ALWAYS a noticeable delay.
There’s NO delay, when I start the next song in Ableton and there’s also no delay if I choose any other song from the setlist in the browser window and start that one.
I’m using Ableton 11.3.4 and Ableset 2.4.1 on a 2013 Intel Macbook running MacOs 12.1
The issue occurred live with a Scarlett Interface and also while I’m testing it right now with the internal soundcard.
I can confirm this behavior.
Slight delay when using the automatic jump to next song after a „Stop“ marker.
I have also posted a small issue with the lyrics page in these cases.
As soon as you select the next song and go back to the current one and hit play there is no delay and the lyrics page starts correctly.
Hmm, that’s super strange. When you press the space bar in AbleSet’s web app, AbleSet always just sends a startPlaying command to Live, regardless of whether AbleSet just automatically jumped to a song after reaching a STOP locator or you manually jumped to a song by selecting it in the setlist, so there shouldn’t be a difference between these two situations.
I also can’t seem to replicate this behavior on my end. If possible, could you send a log package including your project file to support@ableset.app so I can check whether there’s something specific in your project file that might trigger this delay? You can create one by clicking on “Create Log Package” in AbleSet’s settings menu.
You can also send me a video of the delays on your end, that often helps with troubleshooting.