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Prime Mover wrote:Terry, this is obviously not a case of my rushing, and even if I was, the fact is that the MIDI is ahead of the recording. It doesn't matter if I play to a click or not, the MIDI is always ahead of where the audio was when it was initially recorded.

Believe it or not, I was only kidding around. I know you are frustrated with this. No way was I being serious in the slightest. I hope some solution is discovered.

Terry

A workaround is to use a hardware synth and monitor thru a mixer, not DP while recording, then assign the MIDI track to your VI post-recording.

HCMarkus wrote:A workaround is to use a hardware synth and monitor thru a mixer, not DP while recording, then assign the MIDI track to your VI post-recording.

I don't think that would solve anything. The recording monitoring is actually pretty close, it's way farther off on playback. Any MIDI data coming from anywhere is being printed early, so a hardware synth won't be much better.

terrybritton wrote:Believe it or not, I was only kidding around. I know you are frustrated with this. No way was I being serious in the slightest. I hope some solution is discovered.

Gotta admit, I was totally confused by your post.

Prime Mover wrote:

terrybritton wrote:Believe it or not, I was only kidding around. I know you are frustrated with this. No way was I being serious in the slightest. I hope some solution is discovered.

Gotta admit, I was totally confused by your post.

As I was confused by your confusion! I've never had a joke misunderstood before, literally never. It threw me a little. I thought the manual reference really made it obvious.

Oh well - old age must be approaching. Must learn to stay serious like an adult is supposed to, I suppose.

Terry

I actually started reaching for my manual, then I realized something didn't make sense, but I still don't get the joke, TBH.

Prime Mover wrote:I actually started reaching for my manual, then I realized something didn't make sense, but I still don't get the joke, TBH.

I can wait...

Terry

It's the nature of jokes. Especially when written, as it is often hard to see the smile across the miles.

Back to the subject at hand...

I experimented with my system and confirmed the Fine Tune I/O Timing offset adjustment does work but only on audio that LEAVES from and RETURNS to DP; it does not effect internal timing (Audio to Audio, VI to Audio), which I found to be extremely accurate. I used a 44.1k sample rate to test and routed audio from DP thru my 828mkII and back again, all in the digital domain.

With playback/record values of -168/+160, timing on my system is super when running with buffers of 256 or greater.

Experimenting with BFD and NI VIs, I found BFD returned audio perfectly in time with the MIDI trigger at buffers of 256 or greater. NI Battery appeared to delay 40 samples even after I trimmed the hit hat sample I was using (about 1 millisecond at 44k sample rate), so I used BFD for my testing. At a buffer of 128, audio and VI's are returning about 6 samples early. I can't run a smaller buffer with my 828mkII.

Although audio and VI playback timing is very accurate and consistent across buffer sizes, triggering a Yamaha S90ES (via USB) returns ever-increasing lag as buffer size is increased:

Buffer 128 = 130 samples late (About 3 milliseconds)
Buffer 256 = 260 samples late (6 ms)
Buffer 512 = 520 samples late (12 ms)

It appears MOTU has not properly compensated for buffer size impacts on MIDI data output; interesting to note that the relationship between buffer size and delay in samples is linear, suggesting a possible easy fix in an equation somewhere within DP. This finding is somewhat troubling but, because I don't often record hardware synths, not a big issue for me. Of course, latency like this can be easily fixed by sliding a track in time post-recording.

If you want MIDI to line up with your VIs sounding on input, I continue to believe the "Sync MIDI" preference I discussed earlier in this thread is the key.

I'll reiterate my suggestion you contact MOTU if timing issues mentioned (like the failure of plugins to sync) are not otherwise resolvable. Here's hoping a fix is quickly found.

Yeah, where-as on my machine, MIDI Timing I/O DOES seem to adjust the timing of VIs, but "Sync MIDI" does NOTHING.

I was reading about a different issue, and the subject of "MIDI-Jitter" was brought up. As I'd never heard of it before (!) I Googled it, and found a couple interesting articles.

This one suggests that DP 8 is one of many hosts guilty of exhibiting Jitter and it looks very much like the kind of situation brought up by Prime Mover:

http://expressiveness.org/2012/12/04/MIDI-jitter

The author made these remarks concerning the test methodology in this thread here.

I purposely [ED] left some details out to prevent the article from getting too long. Here are some answers:

1. Tests are perfectly reproducible, I ran them at lest three times for each host and the results were always exactly the same.
2. The behavior is totally consistent when using other VST or AudioUnit instruments.
3. I manually zoomed in to sample precision, snipped at the first non zero sample, zoomed back out and then used bar boundary snapping in the DAW to align the start of the snipped clip with the beginning of the bar.
4. The signal chain was exactly the same for each test, just switching out the final host/DAW. I performed the same tests to another box over Ethernet MIDI though and also using iConnectMIDI for MIDI over USB. The behavior is exactly the same.

Actually, the behavior has been confirmed by plugin developers for Logic (see the comments on my article). The MIDI sample offsets in Logic are not set when processing live MIDI, they are set when using the built in sequencer.

Sound-On-Sound magazine had an article on reducing MIDI timing problems, but I have not read it yet. They also admit their solutions will not work for everybody.
http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/ ... g-problems

Here is the google search I did - perhaps there are more gems in here, but I cannot read all this tonight.
https://www.google.com/search?q=MIDI%20jitter

So, latency might not be the problem - jitter may be the culprit!

Terry

I just saw this topic....its related to my problem with Kronos.....

"Fine Tune Audio Timing" could be a solution,but how can I fix it if the problem is not stable?

Here is an example at 512 buffer.Same pass recorded several times.
Marker is where the hits should normally be.

Kronos is connected via USB to my mac for MIDI...Audio is via SPDIF and ANALOG.


The brown tracks are via ANALOG outputs, greens are SPDIF.



Last one using DP 8.

Another test........blue is MIDI via micro express......green is via usb.
Marker shows where the hit should be in the first place.......

Anyone test this with DP9? I haven't bothered to update since it really didn't seem to offer any features that interest me, but if it cures this problem, it would be worth it.

My testing was DP9.12 under Sierra.

I suspect that the variation Yiannis is seeing may be the synth he is driving. I couldn't read the demarcations in his screen shots and am thus unable to determine how much latency he is recording.

Latency via MIDI as opposed to USB is likely to be higher due to low MIDI baud rate.

Hi Marcus,

I don't know if its Kronos so I have two more tests.
One in LogicX and one in DP 9.12 both at 256 buffer.

As you can see Logic is more accurate but a little ahead..perhaps not a big deal.

Dp 9.12 on the other hand is about a 64th later......thats a lot!!