Latency using guitar to USB cable increases over time

Question

I bought a cheap Guitar to USB cable and it works fine for recording on OS X (using Ableton). But over a short period of time (5+ minutes) the latency seems starts to build up on the input and I really notice it between playing a note and hearing it.

I've tried playing around with the sample rate and buffer size (now set to 48k and 32 samples) but nothing seems to work for a long period of time and it's rather annoying.

On first firing up Ableton or changing the above settings there is no noticeable latency, also note the same thing happens in Guitar Rig/Peavey Revalver independent of Ableton.

Is there anything I can do or do I need to buy some better hardware?

Answer 1

as stated by joseem in his comment, it's best if you use ASIO4ALL as your recording driver to overcome most (not all) latency issues.

for as far as the reason of why this is is happening, it could be lots of different things, some examples are that your laptop's specs are not really the best and the CPU ussage by the recorder build up over time, try monitoring your CPU usage to check this possibility.

or, your recording is saving a cache somewhere on your disk and it's hitting it's maximum size, try increasing the maximum cache file size to fix this.

I'm not really good with Ableton and only used it once for 5 minutes and then quit it to go back to FL, which is my preffered DAW, but I think the same logics apply to your problem.

EDIT: ASIO4ALL is not available on mac!