[BUG] Recording Midi at ANY latency on ANY system (sync)

And the plot thickens… Just to confirm that you have not been automatically compensating without your own realization have you tried the test by just cranking your buffer setting to the maximum of 20 seconds or more?

So far it seems the difference in your case (if true) is your on a Mac??

Can anyone else running MAC confirm that MAC Cubase does not exhibit this behavior?

Perhaps it is indeed having to do with ASIO/Core differences?

Lets see if anyone else can run this test on Mac and PC to see who cannot prove it is true for everyone. Right now this is the sole case which disputes my main claims.

I have to say I was expecting to find the note to be early, because when I record MIDI along with audio I am usually well ahead of the beat (so is everyone else I record). > I assume this is because musicians compensate for the delay inherent in all MIDI systems > (even MIDI keyboards using internal sounds, not just VSTis) by playing early.

Musicians will, especially if playing to metronome, play one side of the beat or the other as if you play spot on you can’t hear the metronome. Actually, if you can make the metronome disappear you are a master of timing.

I don’t doubt there is a problem here but it’s not the one most posters seem to assume.
I’d say that on certain system setups that Cubase is placing notes erratically. They may be regular errata but they’re still errata.
I also remember that some time ago on some soundcards, including Emu for one, had drivers that delivered erratic notes at higher latencies.
There is an anomaly in these threads that people seem to be increasing the latency because they play “live”. !? (or have I misinterpreted something? Just to exaggerate the anomaly found?) I’ll try to keep that in mind.
If you want to play live midi then you turn the QUANTISE to it’s max. 128trips or OFF.
When I do this at normal latency on any DAW the notes arrive as played. Normal latency for me is about 5 - 8ms. There would be no point in increasing it as when I play I want to hear myself at the right time.

Why would I want to have to have latency so bad I have to compensate for it? Furthermore, why would anyone here? If you buy a DAW like Cubase I would suppose that common sense and proper research would tell you that you need an interface and drivers that delivered the lowest latency possible.

It may seem like a retrograde step if I suggested that it could benefit some posters with the problem that they actually reverted to an earlier driver for their soundcard as the fault could be with the newest and see if Cubase shows any improvement or not.

I am on Mac and this problem happens for me as well. Specifically what Cubase does and other sequencers don’t do is it records the MIDI at the timing you played rather than the timing that matches what you heard while playing. So if you are playing a VI that has latency, all your MIDI will be early. This blows because you can never tell whether you played a good performance or not. You will have heard a good performance, but when you play it back, its all early. You can try really hard to play the right timing even though you are hearing all the wrong thing, but you will feel very bizzare.

But there is an even worse MIDI problem in Cubase. It has huge MIDI jitter when you are live monitoring. For example, if you hook up an external seqencer that just plays back straight 16th notes and have it play into a VI track that is record enabled, you will hear terrible terrible timing all over the place if you are at any buffer above 64 samples. Obviously this happens with normal playing too, but using the external sequencer will make it crystal clear to you how bad it is. Sucks…

Thanks for the response, but please not that this Bug report requests that no monitoring of your midi destination to take place. This test is to be either confirmed or unconfirmed by recording Midi while the instrument(s) are muted or disconnected and listening only to the Cubase metronome while recording.

The positive result will be what ffg reported which is a delayed midi recording of 0.01-0.02 ms consistently.

Midi jitter is also not the purpose of this thread report.

Hi beerbong

The audio buffer range available on my RME system is 32 samples to 2048 samples. I did the test at 64 and 2048 and there was NO difference to where the MIDI note and the audio of the keystroke appear in relation to each other - in both cases it was about 0.01 sec apart (MIDI later than audio). The MIDI keystroke was not triggering any sound as that might well have affected my perception (though it would not have altered the MIDI/audio timing - and of course there was no need to have a click running, as I am simply testing the timing accuracy of MIDI v audio recording.

by the way, .01 sec is 10 ms, not 1 ms.

(edit to say - is there anything else I can test on my system which would throw any light on this?
BTW I posted on the other related thread a couple of thoughts about probably why many folks are suffering from early MIDI syndrome)

Hope this helps.

if you are at any buffer above 64 samples.

And why would anyone want to do that?
And why would they need to? Because their system is not configured properly in the first place for any modern DAW.
Don’t tell me it works on X or Y DAW because the physics will not add up and furthermore it wouldn’t be relevant to this thread.
Jitter is a hardware expression. Originally “the jitters” comes from the physical shakes of alcoholism or being frightened of demons. Hardware jitter is the same but caused by solid componentry vibrating.
Software can’t do that. Software has “glitches”.
If we mix in the jitter rubbish we’ll get even further from solving any problem here. Another matter entirely.

Sigh…this is the same issue man, including the jitter, and I don’t think you are helping the cause by trying to shut down your allies. All these MIDI problems have to do with how Cubase interprets the time difference between when an event is heard and when it is triggered. Same internal code.

Hi Robotpriest

What you describe is EXACTLY what happens when you play a VSTi in time with a Cubase arrangement/click track. You play ahead of the beat because the sound you hear from the VSTi is delayed whilst you are playing it. You automatically compensate for it, maybe without even realising.

When you play the recording back, there is no such delay and so your ahead of-of-the-beat playing sounds just as you would expect - ahead of the beat.

it’s not Cubase’s fault…

Heh funny post, but guys seriously read this. This Cubase problem is ancient and it is absolutely related to the “early notes” problem you are finding now.

Thanks… I don’t know what else to say, your signature shows you run Nuendo also. Perhaps you can test the same thing on that system…

Do you have a optional sound card to try easily?

Do you have optional driver to try? (Sorry I’m not familiar with MAC architecture , ASIO/Core??)

Ok…its not Cubase’s fault in the sense that Cubase is a non-conscious entity that does what it is programmed. As I said, Cubase records the MIDI with the timing it was played at. But that does not match what you hear whilst you are playing. It is very difficult to play one thing and hear another! Don’t you think so?? Sit at a piano and play for a hour. Now go to Cubase and record something to a metronome and then play it back. Not good.

Steinberg should match the recorded MIDI to what you heard while playing. This is what Logic does and it works better.

Well how come several million users don’t have the problem?
You may mean well but you are not an ally here. And how, exactly, is Cubase supposed to know when YOU hear a note played? It only “hears” the trigger.
It is in that box and you are outside pressing keys.
“Same internal code” What’s that supposed to mean exactly? Of course it is. We all know that. Couldn’t be anythng else really, could it? :mrgreen:

Or at least make it an option which behavior you want. But I really doubt once anyone had tried having recorded MIDI aligned to what they heard while making the recording that anyone would want to go back to the old way. It is just too bizarre feeling to try and play a rhythm that sounds wrong while you are doing the recording.

Robot, I simply trying to simplify this ‘test’ for the purposes of narrowing down this problem to see how many are affected or not.

I decided that for this test we can take VSTi out of the equation even though recording to a vsti track will most likely exhibit the exact same symptoms if Cubase is not recording Midi as expect. Therefore, I would like to ask that for the simplicity of testing we eliminate various VSTi or complex Midi routing to a single Midi input device and a single audio device.

Not trying to disrespect anyone or discredit them.

Honestly, I think most of the users don’t have the chops to notice these problems strange as it sounds.

Cubase knows when I heard the note played; its whenever Cubase played the audio. Let me give you an example. Lets say buffer is 1024. At time 0 you press C#. Cubase plays the audio from the instrument at time 1024. Now when Cubase sets the time of the recorded MIDI event, should it use time 0 or time 1024? I believe the answer is 1024.

It’s because the common practice is to switch the buffer setting to ‘low latency mode’ when recording and switching back to high latency mode for mixing and heavy cpu intensive tracks… When switch ‘modes’, audio is always recorded “as you hear it” (ie. in time with the playback position).

Audio recording doesn’t suffer in high latency mode, so why does Midi suffer (on affected system)?

no prob :slight_smile:

Not sure it does. AIUI, Logic uses a neat system for providing very low latency for VSTis whilst running a much bigger buffer for the rest of the system. So when you record MIDI you have less delay to compensate for, and your timing is more accurate.

The problem really is latency in the system - most notably when you play a VSTi. As someone once observed, latency is like the sand in your sandwich.

And what that tells me is that any given DAW (and they all seem to be mantioned here) corrects errata sent by the relevant interface driver.
The jitter is in the hardware (soundcard), the driver compensates and the DAW compensates even more. And at the bottom of the box is the sensible solution of lowering the buffer rate to about 6ms. Furthermore, what is not mentioned is that the DAW also has to compensate for the PLAYER as well.
Don’t forget that the midi always goes through the WHOLE system even when you have no VSTi assigned!
The midi notes also come in and are recorded whether there’s any VSTi or external synth there or not. They are sent to them later.
Thankfully for me if not for some I have always found, timingwise, that most recording mediums have always been more accurate than myself. :mrgreen:

Actually, thinking about why people have not been screaming about this issue more, another reason might be that alot of the new users have been exclusively using softsynths and don’t remember what it used to feel like to play on the old rompler synths where the latency was near zero. So the standard for timing is so low now, the expectation for Cubase is also very low timing-wise.