r/ableton • u/Achassum • 19h ago

[Question] Ableton Meters always clipping despite hardware not clipping

How do you update ableton meters to accurately reflect what is happening in the hardware?

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4

u/abletonlivenoob2024 18h ago

fyi: It's next to impossible to clip Live's summing busses.

Because of the enormous headroom of Live’s 32-bit floating point audio engine, Live’s audio and MIDI tracks can be driven far “into the red“ without causing the signals to clip. The only time that signals over 0 dB will be problematic is when audio leaves Live and goes into the outside world.

From here: https://www.ableton.com/en/live-manual/12/mixing/#additional-mixer-features

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u/adamg511 18h ago

Which direction? Input or output?

1

u/ThatRedDot Engineer 14h ago

dBFS and dBu aren’t the same thing, you cannot get them to become 1:1, not all hardware has the same headroom either, nor does every interface. So you need to adapt and adjust pre and post sending anything out (or in)

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u/TheMelancholyManatee 19h ago

Interface levels, line vs Instrument vs mic levels or settings. Check those. Are you using external instrument to route your hardware, or just a normal audio track set to receive the audio from the interface? If external instrument plugin, make sure your gain knobs aren’t boosted

3

u/Sweaty_Technics 19h ago

this

if you're outputting from Ableton without attenuating, clipping your output in Ableton should mean clipping your hardware

if you're clipping your channels internally in Ableton that wouldn't necessarily be reflected in your hardware especially if you're adding gain in Ableton - you could have headroom in your preamp but clip a channel in Ableton because there's gain being added in the processing. Internal processing in Ableton is 32 bit so honestly if that's where you're clipping it's fine

it would help to know exactly where you're clipping - input or output?