MIDI timing issues with Ethno?
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 3:51 pm
I am getting more and more MIDI timing issues with Ethno. At least I assume Ethno is at fault and not Digital Performer or my computer, as I ONLY get these faults with Ethno and nothing else.
I track one instrument at a time and disable all others, to minimise CPU and memory usage. I am using Ethno regularly for click track generation, but also for other stuff (melodic audio tracks). I have gotten glitches in both cases.
Sometimes the timing is just off (and I examined my MIDI VERY carefully). For instance, I use a woodblock for my basic click count (quarter notes), and a cowbell with a bar of quarters followed by a bar of eighth notes, for occasional cues throughout a song that I am using backing tracks for on stage. All of this is done with a mono-sum to Bus 1 during tracking. Anyway, especially at the start of the song (even if I give one to two bars advance), the first few measures are imprecise, which is not good for a click track! Yet I have no SysEx or MIDI CC's.
Other times, several minutes into the song, during a silent stretch with no MIDI data, I get a glitch where an unexpected note event occurs at full volume, tricks out the counter, and then settles down a few bars later, missing the first few note events of my next two-bar cue. But I find it more efficient (especially when recording/mixing a lot of songs at once) to just "let it fly" vs. recording each section separately and doing a "merge soundbites" afterwards (this depends -- sometimes I do it the other way, but it partly depends on whether I need to monitor what's going on, which is rarely the case with the click track which has a steady velocity=80 value throughout).
I thought I remembered someone else bringing up this problem a while back, but the only reference I found here was for audio glitches unrelated to rendering a MIDI track.
I have all the latest updates of DP, Ethno, and Mac OS X 10.4.10. But I also have only noticed this problem popping up (no pun intended) this past month or two. The "beginning-of-song" timing instability has been with me since the beginning, however, but is unpredictable.
I've also had volume problems where I don't get the same resulting volume in different projects even with all the same settings. I have been unable to find a cause when analysing the files, the MIDI data, the VI plug-in settings, routing, etc. But as Digital Performer is a Single Document Interface product, one has to depend on faulty memory and/or meticulous note-taking to really compare projects with confidence.
I track one instrument at a time and disable all others, to minimise CPU and memory usage. I am using Ethno regularly for click track generation, but also for other stuff (melodic audio tracks). I have gotten glitches in both cases.
Sometimes the timing is just off (and I examined my MIDI VERY carefully). For instance, I use a woodblock for my basic click count (quarter notes), and a cowbell with a bar of quarters followed by a bar of eighth notes, for occasional cues throughout a song that I am using backing tracks for on stage. All of this is done with a mono-sum to Bus 1 during tracking. Anyway, especially at the start of the song (even if I give one to two bars advance), the first few measures are imprecise, which is not good for a click track! Yet I have no SysEx or MIDI CC's.
Other times, several minutes into the song, during a silent stretch with no MIDI data, I get a glitch where an unexpected note event occurs at full volume, tricks out the counter, and then settles down a few bars later, missing the first few note events of my next two-bar cue. But I find it more efficient (especially when recording/mixing a lot of songs at once) to just "let it fly" vs. recording each section separately and doing a "merge soundbites" afterwards (this depends -- sometimes I do it the other way, but it partly depends on whether I need to monitor what's going on, which is rarely the case with the click track which has a steady velocity=80 value throughout).
I thought I remembered someone else bringing up this problem a while back, but the only reference I found here was for audio glitches unrelated to rendering a MIDI track.
I have all the latest updates of DP, Ethno, and Mac OS X 10.4.10. But I also have only noticed this problem popping up (no pun intended) this past month or two. The "beginning-of-song" timing instability has been with me since the beginning, however, but is unpredictable.
I've also had volume problems where I don't get the same resulting volume in different projects even with all the same settings. I have been unable to find a cause when analysing the files, the MIDI data, the VI plug-in settings, routing, etc. But as Digital Performer is a Single Document Interface product, one has to depend on faulty memory and/or meticulous note-taking to really compare projects with confidence.