ORIGINAL: John

It is not just a Sonar issue. Look to your MIDI interface as well. Not all MIDI interfaces are as accurate in timing as we may think.

+5000

A few points

1 - You will get MORE jitter if you use 960 PPQ. (huh?). Its true. If you want more reliable timing accuracy, then go with 480, or if you can, go even lower than that. The only downfall of lower PPQ is that you are introducing a very subtle form of quantizing to whatever you record. However, let's do the math:

at 120 BPM, that is 2 quarter notes per sec. That is 1920 ticks per sec, which is sub millisecond.

So right off the bat, changing to 480 PPQ will give you theoretically around 1ms tick timing.

However, what you need to know is that the Windows OS is not even capable of reliably providing timing even that low. Many tests and studies have been done about this. As soon as you try to get down to 1ms timing, or even somewhat higher...the error rate goes up...which is what gives you real jitter. This is particular true while recording your midi track from a midi keyboard. USB adds even more latency and jitter to the mix.

If you could, for example, live with say 5ms ticks, then the jitter is a lot less, because the OS timers can keep up with it more or less error free.

200 ticks per second = 5ms ticks. At 120 BPM that is only 100 PPQ.

Moral of the story, lower PPQ values will give you more reliable and error free, reproducible playback. It will play back more exactly what you see on your PRV. As you raise the PPQ, more and more jitter will be present. The downside is that if you want to nudge notes forward or backward by 1ms or whatever...then you need the higher PPQ and just have to live with the jitter. One situation where you might care about that is if you're doing film scoring or something where you need to line up beats on frames, etc.. Having more PPQ allows you to calculate tempos that are more accurate for those hit points. In that case, you're not using a midi keyboard to record, so the Windows OS crappy timers are not relevant. Also, once the midi track is recorded, if its playing back through a VSTi, then when the track is frozen or a mixdown is done, in theory there should be no jitter. If it has to play back through external midi gear or even using a virtual midi cable inside the PC...then the jitter can be bad and there is not much Cakewalk can do about it.

2 - Cubase is notoriously worse

I probably shouldn't say this here but, if you want tight midi, logic on a mac just kills.

timing problems exist on the Mac also, don't kid yourself. If you want more accuracy, use hardware. In the old days a lot of people using macs used to let their MOTU midi timepiece act as the master midi timer and have the mac slave to it. This was more reliable as somehow the interrupt received by the mac, from the hardware somehow forced a less jittery performance.

But also don't get down about it. The timing these days is remarkably good on both OSX and XP and as I said, if you're using soft instruments, then they should all be mixing down without jitter. The biggest issue today IMHO is the timing havoc created by using USB midi controllers. For this reason I use a parallel interface midi interface on my PC. If you're the kind of person that does not rely on real time performance timing too much and tends to quantize or program most of your notes to where you want them....most of this is a moot point.

And personally, I think most of the time 240 PPQ is plenty of precision and much less jitter.

I don't think I'm kidding myself but it certainly seems a lot tighter to me. i never have the sense that what's recorded is different than what i played like I sometimes get in windows - not picking on any particular app- they all seem the same in that regard and things like quantizing in Reason feel like I'm playing hardware, it makes me play tighter, seems to move me while I'm playing, while in windows apps I never really feel it when I play but only hear it upon playback. Purely subjective, but that's how it seems to me.

its not tighter. check this:

http://community.sonikmatter.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=28795&st=0&p=173741&
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5411553
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-25082.html

There are certain applications which have been poorly implemented on both platforms and the timing problems on them has been horrendous. cubase on Windows has been terrible for a long time. Cakewalk has always had solid midi timing, as much as can be expected. Reason probably does not use 960 PPQ either by the way, see my earlier post about that. I would expect very similar performance on the Windows version of Reason.

Atari on the other hand had MUCH better support for accurate low level timers in the OS, so Atari midi sequencers are notorious for being rock solid compared to both Mac and PC.

Also, different people have had wildly different results than other people using the same software on the same operating system...both Mac and PC.

Here are some articles on this topic:

http://stretta.blogspot.com/2007/07/daw-midi-timing-redux_25.html
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar00/articles/miditime.htm
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar01/articles/pcmusician.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct04/articles/qa1004-7.htm
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~bthom/publications/NIME_04.pdf
http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_new_millennium_withmidi/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741307.aspx

Ok, I stand corrected, I'm kiddin' myself, mac's midi blows, whatever. I only know what happens for me and that's as I've described. I'm not really interested in trying to establish some "objective truth" of the matter.
Good luck.

Maybe all of this is why so many producers still sequence on MPCs, Roland MVs, Korg Workstations, etc...

What a shame that all of this progress in technology has actually contributed to MIDI timing becoming worse over the years. One cause: Most developers probably don't know what a "tight" record even sounds like. Maybe they need to go and (re)visit some of the golden days of tight studio-musician records, such as the later Steely Dan records, the Quincy Jones records, the Jay Graydon produced records. Those are just a few examples. Obviously there are many more from many eras. But those certainly represented a time when "time" was critical.

Thanks for the continued great input everyone! Hope I can find the time to read those articles. Hope even more that Cakewalk will turn their attention to MIDI timing for the next Sonar release.

I hear ya there on all counts. That is definitely one reason people use MPC's. I have thought about getting one just for that reason. I also thought about picking up an older used thing like a Roland hardware sequencer or something like this. But in the end I decided that the timing on Sonar is perfectly adequate enough for what I am doing. All things considered, I think Sonar's midi timing is about as good as its gonna get on Windows due the OS limitations.

Depending on your situation and what you're trying to accomplish, you might be able to tighten things up in your studio through other means. What are you trying to accomplish? Describe your sequencing method and exactly when and how you experience the jitter.

Here are random suggestions

1 - Get a parallel or serial port based midi interface for your midi keyboard, do *NOT* use USB. This will help capture your realtime performance a lot lot lot more accurately.

2 - If you can't use the above, try PCI based midi

3 - lastly try firewire midi

4 - Try setting the PPQ lower as I suggested earlier.

5 - make sure you're playing back all midi tracks through VSTi's in sonar, nothing external to Sonar

6 - Freeze midi tracks into audio as soon as possible.