Attention Ivory piano users - verify this bug please (FIX IS ON THE WAY)

In X3 and Platinum there is a bug that so far for me only affects Ivory Piano. TruePianos does fine. If you own Ivory, please try this test below and let me know if the same thing happens. This bug is not present in 8.0, 8.5 or X1
If you record a midi piano part, then make a mistake, set up an autopunch, backup a few bars before the punchin spot, then hit record and play the new piano part along with the old piano part to get ready for your punch in, you may notice some low notes sustaining in the background before the punch in point, even if you’re not using the sus pedal at all.
After the punchin you may still hear a note sustaining and stop and hear that one note or notes sustaining. If you play back the piano part, you won’t hear any sustain problem. The lost note off problem only seems to occur under certain playing styles like I have in the below example. I have a CWP and BUN file here  https://onedrive.live.com...d=C256E2DAE26B22A5!105
With Ivory since the low note samples last 30sec – 2min. This can really be a problem, even after the punchin if you don’t get any new notes sustaining you have some low note sustaining in the background for quite a while and if a client is in the room that can be bad.
Since this bug is hard to document and prove using the above autopunch method, I created the recipe below that involves what is happening before the autopunch engages. You have 2 pianos playing the exact same part together for a bar or so before the autpunch engages.
 
This example involves using an external mixing board. If you don’t have one, just route the output of the piano from the soundcard  back into one of the audio inputs of the sound card to record the midi and audio simultaneously. Even mono recording is fine.
Open Platinum template
load Ivory piano and a preset piano with one midi track and one audio track
route the Ivory output into an external mixing board
create audio track
route the output of the external mixing board to the input of the audio track
set tempo to 90
arm midi track only
record simple rhythm pattern using a one note low left hand bass and right hand chord rhythm with a C chord, go up chromatically each bar until you hit F#. Play very legato with no sus pedal, hang onto every note and chord until the next one
clone the midi track with no events
arm the 2^nd midi track and audio track
rewind, hit record and try to play the exact same piano part along with the first midi piano track
pretty quickly you should hear the note offs and since you recorded the audio you can solo the audio track and listen to exactly what you heard while playing one piano track back while recording a 2^nd one live.
Now clone the audio track (no events) and arm it
Mute the first audio track and leave both pianos unmuted and hit record. You’ll notice when both pianos start playing that there are no lost note offs. You hear what’s expected, 2 pianos, slightly out of sync with some phasing, but no lost note offs sustaining.
 
If you don’t hear any problems, then download my CWP or BUN.
https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=C256E2DAE26B22A5&id=C256E2DAE26B22A5!105
 You’ll see both midi piano tracks. Mix 1 is the first audio recording that let’s you hear the horrendous lost note offs. Mix 2 is a recording of the 2 midi tracks after they were recorded. Showing that this problem only happens with one midi track playing back and you’re recording the 2^nd midi track live with your keyboard controller.
With me, this problem in this example happens immediately every single time. I tired TruePianos 2 or 3 times and no problem whatsoever.
There may be other softsynths that have this same problem, but so far Ivory is the only one for me.
 
Sorry for the long post. Ivory users please try this and report back.

bapu
I have seen this behavior in almost any version of SONAR and I've had the problem with other VSTi libraries. From my experience it's not limited to Ivory. I had it happen with a Kontakt string patch for example.
 
My simple work around is to always be cautious and drag back any MIDI notes so that they end before the punch-in then manually extending the MIDI notes from the original clip into the punch in for a "natural" feel.
 
But if the bakers can fix this I'd be a happy camper.

Yes I know what you're referring to in all versions of Sonar it seems as far back as I can remember. But at least that's something I can deal with and adjust to and have over the years. But what I'm referring to is far worse.
 
Imagine if you need to record a piano part that requires a lot of stopping and autopunching in. After setting the autopunch point, rewind a few bars, hear the previous piano, start playing along to get ready for the punch, all of a sudden you hear some low notes droning in the background and even after autopunch engages you still hear the discordant roar of notes sustaining. With all that distraction it's hard to pick up little mistakes, which you'd normally stop and fix. And if a client is in the room hearing all of this, that's unacceptable.
 
What you referring to is after you've recorded a track and listen back you may find some of the punch in points didn't work that well and you may have to add a sus pedal event or lengthen some chopped off notes. It's easy to see all the punch in points, because they're new clips and then easy to check those and see if they require any editing. That's irritating, but at least that's workable.
 
This bug is a show stopper for me as it was in X3. I can't be going back and forth between Platinum and 8.5, it's too time consuming loading projects with lots of memory like Ivory and Superior drummer. I hope they fix this. I'm beginning to wonder if all the Ivory piano users have ditched Sonar.  I hope some respond, so we can get this fixed.
 
 
 

I've done some more testing on this and using the recipe above with no use of the sus pedal you should notice right at the end of the pattern where the first piano stops and you stop playing the live midi piano (I think every single time) I've noticed some notes ringing out after you stop playing.
 
Keep in mind there is no sus pedal involved so it definitely is lost note offs creating the ringing notes not a sus pedal. When you play back the 2 midi pianos you hear no lost note offs, so somehow things are getting confused when there is a midi stream being recorded from a keyboard controller into a midi interface while a already recorded midi piano is playing back. So there are 2 midi streams coming from different sources that causes this bug.
 
If you try the above recipe, definitely also try a few autopunches after that, using the same chromatic chord pattern. For some reason the lost midi note offs are far worse in the autopunch mode. Before the autopunch engages the roar of lost midi notes is far worse using autopunch than my recipe above. IN fact if you stop playing either before the autopunch engages or right after you'll very likely hear some notes ringing out. I've also tried overwrite and comping. It makes no difference - same problem.
 
I've also tried this test using other Cakewalk included soft synths and none of them have this problem, only Ivory. Keep in mind this bug is not in X1 or 8.5, something changed either in X2 or X3 and still hasn't been fixed.

brundlefly
Have you checked that your MIDI Prepare Using buffer is the same in all versions? X1 lowered the default to 250 from 500 which caused problems for a lot of users. Perhaps you increased it in X1 and the changes did not carry over to later versions.
 
MIDI buffering does not affect live MIDI input echo, but it could be the note offs from the playback of the first MIDI track that are getting dropped, rather than from the live stream as you might assume. If the MIDI buffer is the same in all versions, you still might try increasing it a bit in X3 and Platinum.
 
Similarly, since Ivory is a sample-streaming synth, you should make sure your disk buffering and caching (usually best left disabled) settings are the same in all versions.
 
If one of those settings doesn't explain the difference between versions, then it may well be that something has changed in SONAR. Nevertheless, I would probably ask Synthology to look into this as well, as it could have something to do with the way they stream samples (the big difference between Ivory and something like True Pianos). They must have some familiarity with SONAR and might have some staff that use it regularly who try to reproduce your issue.
 
 
 
 

 Prepare buffers is at 500. Does Sonar have settings for disk buffering? I found this for caching - Enable read caching and enable write caching are unchecked. I've just contacted Synthogy in an email sunday night and asked if they'd look into this and get in touch with Noel about what is different in Ivory and most {if not all) soft synths that could cause this.

brundlefly
Just beneath the caching checkboxes are I/O buffer size. Normally disk buffering problems show up as drive overload warnings in the performance module (icon flashes red) and/or dropouts when streaming a ton of audio tracks. But it's worth trying a higher (or maybe lower) values.

 
I have those numbers set at 512. Do you really think changing those numbers may help this problem? I rarely stream tons of audio tracks. In this particular test the problem happens with no audio tracks recorded.
 
As always thanks for all your suggestions and interest,

brundlefly
512 should be more than enough; in fact you might want to lower it. I think the default is 64, and I run my desktop at 128. My laptop is at 512 because it has a slow drive.

I used 256 for years and then started using 512, because I tend to get some unexplained dropouts out of the blue, for no apparent reason. Do you think these numbers have any effect on the lost note offs?

MIDI note overlaps: synths or DAWs ought to cancel any note in progress when a new note-on of the same note number comes in. In this case, you are playing live while playing back. Possibly, the synth receives two note-ons without an intervening note off. It should cancel what it is doing for that note and start a new attack. Is this something you can easily test? In other words, record a long note. Then rewind and record a very short note, same note number, while the long note is playing. How does the synth respond?
 

Yeah, it should interrupt/mute/restart at least, if not cancel. But from a real keyboard, there would be a note-off before the next note-on for any note number; the sustain pedal does not prevent an incoming note-off from a keyboard. The keyboard has no idea what the synth is supposed to do about the sustain pedal. That depends on the synth's patch. In the synth it just extends the sustain phase if the patch parameters so dictate. The synth should remember that note-off was sent. Otherwise, it wouldn't know whether or not to extend the note when the sustain pedal is lifted.
 
We had this discussion once before ...
 
According to OP, there is no sustain involved anyway. In this case, with a DAW (Sonar's original recorded track) and keyboard both sending (albeit filtered by Sonar), is there a parity of note-offs with note-ons? Do they arrive in a strict sequence? Does Ivory depend on that in some way? And the question behind this question is what is Ivory doing wrong that Truepiano is doing right, and what is the exact circumstance that generates this unexpected behavior? That's why I am wondering about the flow of note-ons & -offs.
 
Interesting about truepianos. I know it has one piano that models soundboard resonance with just a pedal down, but I didn't know about modeling resonance build-up from multiple keystrikes, if that's what it is.
 

Synthogy tech support said they'd get in touch with Noel about all of this and try to figure out why this is happening in X3 and Platinum, but not in 8.5 and before. Am I the only Ivory user that uses autopunch? I'm beginning to wonder.

gmp
Good news Noel verified the bug, which turns out not to be a bug, but a feature. But a fix is in the works.

Noel said:
The issue is that Ivory allocates a voice for each note on even if it is the same note and counts the note offs. Most other synths will turn off the note on receipt of the FIRST note off which is why you don't see the problem with other synths.

This started happening because we added explicit note on management in X2 to address stuck notes with the matrix. It works fine in all cases except when you have duplicate notes which is what happens when you do punch in recording. I am looking into a fix. I doubt it will make it into the upcoming update but I will send you the build to verify on your end.

This explains something I ran into over the weekend in X3 with EastWest Quantum Leap Orchestra. I had a double note that I couldn't see in the PRV and the note wouldn't stop playing. Was a bugger to find it.
 
Regards,
Dan

 
 

gmp

dcumpian

gmp
Good news Noel verified the bug, which turns out not to be a bug, but a feature. But a fix is in the works.

Noel said:
The issue is that Ivory allocates a voice for each note on even if it is the same note and counts the note offs. Most other synths will turn off the note on receipt of the FIRST note off which is why you don't see the problem with other synths.

This started happening because we added explicit note on management in X2 to address stuck notes with the matrix. It works fine in all cases except when you have duplicate notes which is what happens when you do punch in recording. I am looking into a fix. I doubt it will make it into the upcoming update but I will send you the build to verify on your end.

This explains something I ran into over the weekend in X3 with EastWest Quantum Leap Orchestra. I had a double note that I couldn't see in the PRV and the note wouldn't stop playing. Was a bugger to find it.
 
Regards,
Dan

 
X3 has 2 bugs, one which involves the sus pedal and punching in, which has been fixed in Platinum. The other bug involves the lost note offs and this is the one in this thread. I'm not sure which one was affecting you recently and you're right it may have been the bug I reported, because I bet you didn't use the sus pedal for an orchestra sound.
 
I'm surprised more Ivory users haven't chimed in on this thread. Of course if they don't use autopunch or have an engineer manually punching them in, then they would not be affected at all. But any Ivory users that use a punchin method should have noticed this.
 
 Of course many times when something goes a little haywire, many of us tend to think maybe we did something wrong, like picking a bad punchin spot, so maybe some users may have been suffering in silence with this issue, not realizing it's a bug. Or if they're new to Sonar and had not used X1 or 8.5 before, they may think this is the way it's supposed to work.
 
Well, regardless, help is on the way with this bug/feature.
 

Yep, no sustain. I created the duplicate note when I copied a portion of an arpeggio and included the note in error. When I pasted the phrase, I aligned it with the last note, which also happened to be the same as the first note of the copied phrase. So the note had exactly the same start time and duration.
 
Like I said earlier in this thread, I don't use autopunch, but it seems like this could affect a lot more users that do lots of midi editing.
 
Regards,
Dan