Audio & midi not lining up

MISTA_SHIFTA · November 20, 2013, 4:41pm

Robrosen92:

Hey man, thanks for joining the thread and validating my insaneness
First things first, I’m actually on W7 and not 8.1

Unfortunately, I have not solved this issue, and have dismissed it as reality due to the following: Upon looking through every single session ever, I’ve always had the issue, and it’s never been bad enough to notice until i looked closely, so I’m just leaving it and manually moving the parts.

This is a bug. Plain and simple. This is not how the DAW is supposed to transmit midi. I understand, there has to be SOME kind of latency, since the DAW and outboard midi hardware cannot predict the future, but 365 samples worth of it? That’s pretty high! Not to mention, as the other poster had validated, even doing a midi loopback produces out of line midi. That’s just not right.

I am about to pass this on to steinberg as a bug. that’s what it is. plain and simple.

Hey Robrosen,

Thanks for clarifying that you’re on Windows 7. Good to rule out the Win 8.1 update being the issue.

Interesting to hear Svenne’s comment about circa 300 samples latency being the norm - I double checked some projects on my previous system and I was indeed getting about 200 samples delay between the midi note and audio playback on these and it wasn’t noticeable.

However I would have thought this would be the case for processing audio through an external soundcard rather than just playing back a midi note loop. Confused by Svenne’s comments about midi thru too as the Cubase instruction manual says this should be activated, with local off (see link below).

The crux of the issue I’ve been having, though - which I think is the same as Robrosen’s - is that midi playback latency is inconsistent and I’ve now noticed is sometimes far worse than circa 300 samples out. Below is a screen grab of two duplicate midi notes one after the other triggering a Moog arpegiator. The first one comes in over 3,000 samples late (which is very noticeable!), whereas the second has under 1,000 samples latency:

Bear in mind that the above was also with a 400 sample ‘Adjust for record latency’ to bring the recording forward and that these same notes sometimes playback with no latency at all!

@Robrosen could you let me know if the above differs from what you’re experiencing. If so, I’ll submit a separate note to Steinberg.

I keep on banging on about apregiators as this issue is most noticeable when using them. When I’m just playing individual notes, it’s easy to see from the waveform if these are being triggered slightly late and adjust the latency accordingly. With the wall of sound that apregiators create, it’s harder to narrow in on the issue, but I can hear the notes going out of sync. e.g. if I’m triggering a 16 notes per bar apregiator octave on C, bottom C should hit the downbeat each cycle, however sometimes this drifts out of time and flips to top C.

One other thing which I’ve noticed - and might be an issue - is that my ‘Average performance load’ meter at the LHS of the transport panel and in the ‘VST performance’ window regular overloads even though the average performance loads are low. The load randomly spikes when selecting things like audio parts or midi notes, however this doesn’t happen during midi playback or recording.

Again, probably clutching at straws, but could the above be some sort of system interference which is regularly trigging much more latency than I should normally have? In the interim, my hardware synths are gathering dust .