FabFilter

Hi everyone,

I’ve run into a weird issue while working on a few mixes in Ableton Live 11 using FabFilter Pro‑Q 3.

When I automate parameters like the high-pass filter frequency, the automation lane seems to work visually, but the audio doesn’t always respond correctly. For example, I automate the HPF to sweep up and remove the low end. In the plugin window I can clearly see the filter moving, but the sound barely changes. Sometimes it does apply the filter, but much less aggressively than the value shown.

It’s confusing because everything looks correct visually, but the actual audio response is inconsistent.

My setup:

MacBook with Apple M1

Ableton Live 11.3

Latest version of FabFilter Pro-Q3 (AU/VST3)

I’m wondering if this could be:

a plugin automation bug

some kind of latency / plugin delay compensation issue

or maybe something related to VST3 vs AU versions. Some users have reported odd behavior with certain plugin formats in Ableton, especially older VST3 implementations.

Has anyone experienced something similar with Pro-Q3 automation in Live 11?
If you found a workaround or fix, I’d love to hear about it.
fungamesfree.io
Thanks!

Hi Richard,

It seems that Ableton has adjusted the way the plug-ins are dynamically addressed in both Ableton 11 and 12. This also seemed to trigger some weird behaviour in communication between the controller part of the plug-in and the processing part of the plug-in. We've noticed this could sometimes be off when starting playback in the middle of some automation in Ableton 11. As far as we know, this was fixed in Ableton 12, and was an issue inside Ableton. Are you using the latest 11.3 version? I'm not quite sure if this was only addressed in Ableton 12 or also in the latest version of 11.