Ample Guitar -- great sound but latency?

This is a really great sounding sampled guitar.  I already bought it so it's a moot point but I'm not sure I'm understanding the midi time offset.
 
There's a built-in 50ms delay in the sample they explain is to let the sound develop:
 
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=245&t=402869
 
However, the 50ms delay makes the guitar unplayable in real time.  How does the midi time offset help this?  This is only for playback right?  It doesn't know what key you're going to press before you press it... I guess I'm not understanding how this is a solution.
 
Here's another thread where they offer this "solution":
 
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=245&t=402203
 
Am I misunderstanding?

You have a midi guitar or are you using a keyboard?
 
Record a part with a keyboard guitar then play it with ample?
 
This is not an amp sim right? It's a VSTi?
 
Arpeggios or strum arps work well with whole note chords.
 
 

Yes it's a vst instrument I'm playing with a midi keyboard.  I was sold on the demos, they are pretty incredible.
 
What I mean is that -50ms offset will make playback sound correctly but it doesn't make it actually playable in real time...?

I'm experiencing similar issues, so I'm adding in my experiences to this post. After I purchased all of Music Labs' virtual guitars and liked them, I decided to get every one of the Ample Guitars too' (except the nylon'). Like some have already said' the sound quality of Ample Guitars is great. However, the latency is severe enough' to make it difficult to incorporate into projects. I created a test template an hour ago, which was for me'... to be able to identify the main problem in using it' inside of Sonar X3 (or any DAW for that matter). I wanted to draft out a comprehensive tech support email to Ample Sound'. One major problem comes up quickly though - there is no tech support for Ample Sound' (Surprise !). There is only a forum (like this Cakewalk forum) where users take their problems, and hope to have them resolved. If you're very polite and don't mention other similar products (that don't have the same problems as Ample Guitar) they will reply back to you' without deleting your questions (yes, their moderator controls the forum's content like a Microsoft lawyer). Regarding my test template, I made a 16th note arpeggio phrase on a piano and quantized it deliberately. Then loaded Music Labs Real Guitar' and copied the piano part to it. They both played back perfectly in Sonar X3 Producer. I then loaded Ample Guitars Taylor, Martin & PRS and copied the same piano part to their tracks. The out-of-time' MIDI offset made this sound terrible. I rerecorded the identical part in real-time playing/recording the Ample Taylor' track' along to the now' existing piano/Real Guitar tracks; It was very cumbersome to make the instrument (sound) on the millisecond your mind hears the notes and your fingers play the notes.. yet the Ample Guitar software playback sound' is later than your fingers striking the notes. It takes me back in time to 1996' to the bad old days' of Gigasampler'. It had this same type of latency issue too'. But this is now 2014' and we should be passed this. Ample Sound' must be secretly working on a fix to this issue, since their competition Music Labs' (does not) have this problem. My personal opinion: Ample Guitars Taylor' and Martin' sound richer in detail than Real Guitar's acoustic does, but if it makes your productivity slow down or even come to a halt because of its problematic timing issues; stay with the product that adheres to all of your other software's basic rules for professional quality software instruments').

Matt
Yes it's a vst instrument I'm playing with a midi keyboard.  I was sold on the demos, they are pretty incredible.
 
What I mean is that -50ms offset will make playback sound correctly but it doesn't make it actually playable in real time...?

For playing real time the VSTi can't possibly know which key you're going to press next so you'll always get at least 50ms latency.
For MIDI playback, it does know what's coming next, so you can force it to play everything 50ms early, so the sound plays in time.

Topographic4001

Kylotan
You could always play a low latency instrument during tracking, and switch to the high latency version later.

Yes you can, but after you do it' you have to shift that track in time to match your other tracks normal time, or create a special pre-offset track within Sonar to accommodate Ample Guitar's limitations.

Why is that a problem? That's exactly what the Time+ option on a MIDI track is for.
 

It's not a user problem - it's a research & development problem that the manufacturer needs to resolve after this topic' (and it's connected complaints) hit the internet blogs... just not their Ample Sound' blog though... eh'hem.

I don't agree. If they want to model the attack correctly, then that will require some period of time where the sample is almost inaudible. I don't see it as any different from playing a "slow strings" patch where I will have to press the keys some time before the start of the measure for it to sound right. Admittedly 50ms is probably more than the sample really requires, although maybe you need most of that for a whole chord strum. Maybe they could have provided a lower latency truncated sample during tracking, though I don't know how feasible that is. The demo video seems to imply they don't really intend it for real time use.

Topographic4001
Plucked instruments however, should sound the moment your finger plucks/picks or depresses that key. I think everybody who creates music is aware of the nuance when a guitarist moves their pick over the six strings creating the initial first strum; it' being less than a second before the actual (tick) in time of the true tempo' to be fluidly presented. With the intention that it's sixth and last string be struck through the strum on the next beat of the hard tempo. That's what my wooden guitars and basses do'.. the virtual guitars should be the same.

I don't understand what you're saying here. But if the idea is that the last string is heard 'on the beat', that requires that the first string is heard before the beat. Setting a negative delay would be how you achieve this while still having the MIDI notes quantized. This makes sense for strumming; I don't know why they'd have the same thing for individual notes, if they do, but maybe it's so that they can be consistent across the track.

PLaying the actual synth rather than a lower latency alteran

Kylotan
You could always play a low latency instrument during tracking, and switch to the high latency version later.

This doesn't really work for me, as the dynamics of synths differ and when you play you play to the synths dynamics. I often assign Breath controller to an aspect of the synth, but the assignment may not be available to the the lower synth, so I can't play that expression, and if it is, it may respond differently.
 
Then there are the key triggers, these if available will be differently set up, may not be key triggers but ranges.
 
There is nothing wrong with wanting to play the synth you are recording. You may be happy working around, but you can't just dismiss people thinking for those who don't like 'workaround'.
 
 

Scoot
There is nothing wrong with wanting to play the synth you are recording. You may be happy working around, but you can't just dismiss people thinking for those who don't like 'workaround'.

Ah, I'm not dismissing people. Just saying that if they like the sound of the synth, this is one way in which they can use it. Some here seem to want it to be magical and predict the future - eg. playing a strum across 6 strings such that the 6th string is heard when I press my MIDI keyboard! - so maybe they ask too much.
 
Judging by the videos it is intended to be a scoring synth rather than a live synth, so you'd record it bit by bit or even manually enter it into the Piano Roll. If that's not how you like to record (and generally, I don't), then it's probably not the synth for you.

I was highly impressed with the audio and video samples on the Ample Guitar site and considered buying it, so this is interesting.
 
As any of you who know me are aware, I am a huge fan of RealGuitar (Musiclab) because it is simple to use (once you get a couple of concepts down) and the system load is very light.  If you know how to do it, RealGuitar will strum any chord you can think up, plus it is a good solo instrument.
 
I really want Ample to work, though, because it has a different and really good sound.
 
One possible issue: if this is one of those systems that requires you to populate a chart with a list of chords you plan to use in a song, that's OK, but that is way less flexible (for me) than just putting the chords in MIDI as I need them.  I do understand, however, that for someone who does not read music (or does not like to), maybe a chord table is a good thing.

The difference is that there are 2 types of latency in play here - first, a latency in the system that is based on processing time between when the MIDI event is received and the corresponding audio is produced from the synth, and second, a latency that is perceptual based on the 'attack' of the sample, ie. a delay between when a sample starts to play and when it is effectively heard.
 
The first type of latency can (and usually is) automatically adjusted during playback. The DAW and plugin can work out between them how long it takes for a MIDI note to trigger audio and can read the MIDI early to compensate. (Or can push the audio back, but the end result is the same.) The idea is that sample 1 from the soft synth ends up playing back on exactly the frame when the MIDI On event is triggered. This doesn't help during tracking however because that latency is part of the system and (as we've noted) the DAW is incapable of predicting when you are going to press a key on your keyboard. So you will probably hear more latency while tracking than when you play it back.
 
The second type of latency is inherent to the sample. If the sample has an attack that takes 50ms before the main transient or peak is heard, it will feel like the sound has a 50ms latency relative to the MIDI event that triggers it. This is going to be here during tracking but it's also not going to go away during playback. Even with the usual latency compensation, a MIDI event at 1.000 seconds is going to result in that transient/peak being heard at 1.050s because that's how long it takes for the sound to 'get going'. If you know your instrument has that kind of slow attack, you can adjust for that with the Time+ option so that the MIDI is triggered slightly earlier to counterbalance it. But it can't be addressed by plugin delay compensation in the normal sense because the plugin's delay is already compensated for. Sample 1 is already playing exactly when the MIDI On event happens - it's just that you don't hear much until Sample 2000 or so.
 
Now, the plugin could 'lie' to Sonar and pretend it has more inherent latency than it really has, meaning that playback would be more likely to sound like it coincided with the MIDI. But that wouldn't work well if there are a variety of different attack durations (quite likely if some are plucks and some are strums), and either way it would make no difference during tracking because that compensation can't occur in real-time.

The makers are on record as saying the 50ms delay is part of the sound ("it takes around 50ms to get the string really vibrating. We preserve the moment of the stroke, otherwise it will sound like piano.") rather than a processing delay.
 
If I was them I'd try and implement a zero-attack version suitable for tracking (eg. start the samples right before the transient with a very short fade-in) and use the full sample only on playback. I've never written a VSTi though so I'm unsure how practical that is.

Scoot, I use Native Instruments Scarbee J-Bass (and Rick and P-Bass) and I have zero latency problems so maybe that's worth looking at instead of Ample Sound.
 
Note that I always set my Asio buffer low while tracking and high while mixing.
 

Scoot
Wow, is that really the response time of a physical guitar. Doesn't the Haas effect says that a 30ms delay causes a sound to be perceived as a separate sound than another How is this not an issue for a actual guitar player. Why does a piano string respond so differently?

I just did some unscientific studies by recording myself playing guitar, then zooming in on the waveform.
 
This is a single plucked note.

 
The first 20 milliseconds are partly pick noise and partly the string not resonating properly yet, probably due to it being distorted (by the pick movement) near one end of its length and time being needed for the vibration to travel along the whole string and start it all vibrating in unison. Between 20 and 30ms you see the waveform emerging, at 30ms it starts to get a lot louder, but it doesn't peak here until 55ms.
 
You could probably remove the first 20ms and nothing of value would be lost - but that still leaves a 35ms minimum delay to get a realistic-sounding pluck of one string.
 
You'll see the period here for each oscillation is roughly somewhere around 3.3ms and 3.2ms, ie. 303Hz. This is what you'd expect, because I've just plucked an open D which is 293Hz, but a plucked string always starts sharp and settles later.
 
Now, for conjecture:

• I suspect the Haas effect only matters for hearing 2 separate sounds. I don't think a gap of 30ms between motion and hearing will matter (otherwise, standing more than 30ft from a musician or speaker would mean you don't think they're playing or talking, as sound only travels at about 1ft per second).
• Not sure about piano strings, but since they are essentially percussion instruments I expect there is a slightly quicker attack. I also don't think it matters much for the reason above. I don't have a real piano to test with, so any test I could do will be on samples which may have already been trimmed. (I did take a look at NI's The Giant, and that did seem to have removed all the hammer noise so you could hear the fundamental almost immediately. I think TruePianos had a more realistic attack but I don't have time to measure it right now.)

 
 

Thanks fr taking the time to test the waveform, I had contemplated doing the myself, but am juggling a few things until after the weekend.
 
That initial sound is quite low in amplitude, so I agree you could probably dismiss it. Is it the sound of the pick releasing the string, or the initial press against the string. I suspect the latter. Although the peak is at 55 ms, the amplitude is substantial at around 44ms, so removing that 20 seconds pick press m leaves around 24 ms, even less if they treat treat the initial 30 ms as insignificant. The natural envelope of the sound is still there, so hard for them to say it suddenly sounds like a guitar.
 
I guess I'm just annoyed at their answer, because I had spent time looking at the manuals, checking reviews, and the demos and tutorials. It seemed just what I wanted, then suddenly it isn't