After spending days trying to figure out what’s going bonkers in my midi setup, I learned today that all my problems stem from overbridge being a default plugin loaded in Ableton. When overbridge is activated any external midi interface has huge amounts of jitter and sequencers/tempo based gear needs to be adjusted for a whopping 60-80ms of correction when playing routed synths. I discovered as soon as I deleted the overbridge instance all the timing went back to normal with a minimum amount of latency. Jitter was also minimal.
Perhaps this is a Apple and Ableton problem, but wow is it ever unusable. I don’t see any way of sorting this out without just avoiding overbridge all together. I’m running Catalina, Ableton 10 and have a Motu Midi Express XT and MIOXL interface. I’ve tried only using one interface at a time, removing everything else that’s not used, turn off midi ports that aren’t used and seems no hope. I’ve cleaned out old unused extensions on my computer and just ripped my hair out on multiple occasions. I hope one day there will be hope, but for now I think unlikely.
Have you made sure, you’re not sending multiple clocks to and from your Overbridge device(s)? Everything breaks down when you do that because multiple clocks with differing delay compensation will eat up that very limited Midi bandwidth. Either deactivate transport and clock in Overbridge or stop sending and receiving clock on your DN/A4/etc.
Are you sure it’s jitter and not just the latency introduced by the plugin?
You can check by replacing OB with a bunch of limiters with look ahead enabled.
The midi clock sent from ableton is not latency compensated unfortunately, so any plugin introducing latency will mess with the clock timing.
It’s Overbridge, it has a latency of ~30ms or more depending on your CPU. I guess you can fix it with delay compensation if you only record the overbridge tracks. From my experience I don’t think you have any chance to do a multitrack recording of your hardware jam using OB without ruining your swing.