MIDI recording with audio metronome is off
I've often noticed that when I record MIDI in Sonar, I'm often slightly ahead of the beat. I figured this was just my error and fixed things up afterwards with shift and quantisation.
Then recently I've been reading various threads on here complaining about the metronome, about latency, and so on, and I thought I'd perform a little test.
First, I recorded 16 notes on the beat playing along to Sonar's audio metronome.
Second, I recorded 16 notes on the beat playing along to an RXP audio drum loop which was aligned to the tempo.
Both used the master bus and then out to my Audiophile 2496 via ASIO, so latency shouldn't differ in either case. I also used the same keyboard (E-MU XBoard 49 via USB) so the MIDI latency should be consistent too.
It turns out that when I play to the metronome I am much more likely to play the note early, with it landing anywhere between tick 880 and 940 on average, when obviously I want to hit 960/0. Against the audio drums, the earliest I came in was about 920, usually closer than that.
Does anybody else see behaviour like this? (And while I'm here, does anybody have a sample-precise audio loop that would work as a metronome? The drum loop I tested with is a bit busy-sounding for the job.)
Sonar Platinum (Newburyport) / Win 8.1 64bit / Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 / Absynth / Kontakt / Play / Superior Drummer 2 / ESP LTD guitar / etc Twilight's Embrace - gothic/death metal | Other works - instrumental/soundtracks