Timing issues with EW Play 3 & larger audio buffer ?

the pianist got drunker and drunker, until he couldn't hit a single not in time.

You need a low buffer when triggering midi live. also some plugins that are meant for mixing will introduce latency, like perfect space and the LP's.
If your pianist wants to hear the notes as he triggers them, you neeed to lower your ASIO buffer or WDm slider and/or take off those mixing plugins. Theres no way around it.
 
Cj

Hi CJ,

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not actually talking about playing live - this is straight from pre-written MIDI tracks and it happens
even with the tightest quantized input.
It really does sound like a drunk player, it's all over the place, slipping behind and then lurghing forward, then it might thow a bit of swing for ya :-)


It's been bugging me all day this one.
So far it only seems like it's with the EW Play stuff. I'm just downloading their latest update to see if that makes any difference.

Most everything else I've checked VST wise,  I can drive from the same MIDI track and they keep perfect time.
I know the lag you're talking about when playing live, but even that's more consistent than this drunken bum.

Once I get this update downloaded I'll see what happens and do some more testing - try 8.5.3, different projects etc.
I only had limited time this morning, so I'll do the update first and report back.


Cheers - Cliff

Hey thanks guys for all the suggestions,

I tried them all plus a plethora of others - took me hours !

It's definitely a "Play 3" thing I'm hearing here, nothing to do with Sonar at all.

And I may never have noticed this weird timimng anomaly if I hadn't been doing a solo piano piece.
I only really noticed because I was tweaking the tempo map and playing with reverbs, which gave me a couple of pops & clicks.
That lead me to pump up the audio buffer size, which made the issue really flaming obvious.


I've updated Play 3, and tested all kinds of permutatiuons and loading only a single VST in a new project.
Same results every time.

It's certainly not a show stopper, but it's a very odd thing indeed.


I put together several MIDI clips and tried all permutations and settings in both Sonar and Play 3, and nothing changes no matter what.
I scoured all the manuals, diddled with all the settings and tried X1 and 8.5.3 both 32 and 64 bit - behaviour is the same in all.


There are a few things I found interesting about this.

1)   If you bump the audio buffer size up to something really big - like 2048 or 3072 samples, it sounds like the tempo is varying - but it's not.

What is actually happening, is some notes get behind, and then it 'lurches' forward to catch up.

If I insert a different VST - for example a Kontakt piano, and send the same midi data simultaneously, I can hear the 'other VST'
play perfectly in time, while the audio from the EW Play jumps all over the place.


2)   If I create midi tracks with patterns of straight timimg - eg: just 8th notes playing something like a root note followed by the chord,
the way the Play 3 instrument timimg fluctuates also forms a pattern - the fluctuation ends up sounding predictable.

So I'm wondering if this has anything to do with some of the "smarts" built into Play 3 - you know, the stuff to make it sound more "Natural and Real".
Like making some difference to each repeated note, to avoid the "machine gunning" type of sound ?.
I wonder, because it seems like you can't turn that off on QL Pianos like you can in Symphonic Orchestra with the "repeat" button.


I've got a support ticket logged with soundsonline now anyway, so I'll update this if I get any more info.

And after all that, I'm thinking of using a different piano for this project now :-)


Cheers - Cliff