Losing MIDI Sync while loop recording

Greetings All,
Last night while a friend was recording multiple takes/lanes while looping in X2PE, we noticed that the MIDI drums (Superior Drummer) kept falling behind, falling "out of sync".

It wasn't noticeable within a few loops, but after 10 or so loops it was very apparent.

I played with the MIDI buffers, and even tried changing the clock sync, but to no avail...

What am I missing here?

Thank you for any and all suggestions.

Cheers,
MG

happened to me EVERY time in 8.5 pe 

but i havent checked this behaviour in x2 yet

for more loop orientated stuff i use ableton live now

The Bakers will need a detailed recipe to reproduce the issue, and I'm betting it will turn out to be Hardware/Driver/Plugin-specific, as I have not been able to reproduce a problem with this myself. I asked for a recipe in the last thread, and it immediately went silent.

I suspect many users are not reporting this formally, using the Problem Reporter. The more people that report it with detailed steps and conditions to reproduce it, the more likely it is to get fixed, or diagnosed if it turns out to be a 3rd-party issue.


For reference, here's that other thread. OP resolved his problem by changing from WDM to ASIO drivers:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2710950

This happens with me a lot with drums whether it's Session Drummer, Abbey Road or Battery. I don't think that it's a driver issue because it only happens when I set a loop. If I play a song from start to finish all the way through it doesn't happen at all. But set an 8 bar loop, for example, and it starts drifting relatively quickly. It's a real pain if you're looping a section to audition sounds, because you have to keep stopping and starting to "reset" the timing. 

Something's different in your environment.

I can set up an SD3 track (Simple Instrument or separate MIDI and multiple audio output tracks), bounce the audio to another track, invert the phase, loop any range , and the live SD playback will null near perfectly with the audio track for as long as I let it run.

I say "near perfectly" because SD3's real-time MIDI playback is never a 100% consistent to the sample, so you'll hear a a little smidgen of a hit sneak through every once in while, and the tracks can get out of sync by a few samples if you restart playback in the middle of the loop or the loop isn't right on measure/beat boundaries (i.e. not a whole number of audio buffers), but there's no cumulative sync error over time; they'll just drift in and out of phase - first one way and then the other - as the loop iterates. Of course, this isn't ideal behavior, but you're only likely to hear it when trying to null two identical tracks like this. 


I don't have Abbey Road or Battery, but the same pretty much goes for any other synth I try this with - drums or otherwise.

If you can post an example project somewhere using only SONAR-bundled instruments, I'd be interested to see what it does on my machine.

brundlefly


Something's different in your environment.

I can set up an SD3 track (Simple Instrument or separate MIDI and multiple audio output tracks), bounce the audio to another track, invert the phase, loop any range , and the live SD playback will null near perfectly with the audio track for as long as I let it run.

I say "near perfectly" because SD3's real-time MIDI playback is never a 100% consistent to the sample, so you'll hear a a little smidgen of a hit sneak through every once in while, and the tracks can get out of sync by a few samples if you restart playback in the middle of the loop or the loop isn't right on measure/beat boundaries (i.e. not a whole number of audio buffers), but there's no cumulative sync error over time; they'll just drift in and out of phase - first one way and then the other - as the loop iterates. Of course, this isn't ideal behavior, but you're only likely to hear it when trying to null two identical tracks like this. 


I don't have Abbey Road or Battery, but the same pretty much goes for any other synth I try this with - drums or otherwise.

If you can post an example project somewhere using only SONAR-bundled instruments, I'd be interested to see what it does on my machine.

I think we're sometimes too quick to blame our systems and configurations. When you're using a computer which more than meets Cakewalk's minimum specifications, and a popular interface with up-to-date ASIO drivers, and something as widely used as Battery or Session Drummer, and looping screws up the MIDI timing of hits, then I think we can quite confidently say that our $400 DAW is lacking. 

What I mean to say is that it may be something that's different about your configuration as opposed to our's, but if that's the case, such a difference shouldn't be tripping up a program like Sonar. Part of the job of the developers is to make sure that fundamental stuff like this works on all configurations, unless there's something wildly unusual in that setup. I used Battery and Abbey Road extensively in Pro Tools with the exact same specification, and I never had any problems with MIDI notes lagging during a loop.

Sonar does this here to, any vsti playing back any midi track, no matter if there's 1 track or 20, how long the loop is, effect plugins or not etc.. just slowly drifts out of time

After a little while it's so out of time I have to stop and restart.

Sometimes it also affects midi input, the more the midi gets out of sync when playing back notes, the more the input latency increases, everything is reset if you stop and restart the looped region.
Any other DAW I have on the same box works fine.

Ugh, no recipe to correct this then? I'm having just this problem using X2a... As soon as start looping, my Steven Slate Drums 4 starts going out of synch, is bugging the hell out of me.

I guess i'll have to freeze them, but of course this is no good for working on the timing of the midi grrrr.

I'm having a plethora of problems with X2a (which support are trying to help with and have for about a month or more - mostly graphics, to no avail) this has become the latest. 

I think I'm going to uninstall - again, and try going back to the quick fix. X2a has become a mess for me.