Also, Jeff is talking about hardware MIDI ports and synths. The OP is talking about soft synths, which are buffered up in advance, and handled largely like audio tracks in terms of syncing output. When MIDI buffering fails, you get dropped notes, not timing issues. 

Kewl Hendagang
@brando exactly the kind of childish attitude I'll never understand. 

Hey even a child knows an apple is not an orange. You commended Jeff for his comments which if you read them had nothing to do with what you originally posted. If you see something after reading Jeff's post that struck a chord , great, say so. But rigidity does not equal Jeff's anecdote of slipping timing.
I'm out. Good luck.

jb101
 
I would have thought that something quantised 100% should sound "rigid", and if it sounds "alive, less rigid" then something is amiss.
 
As a bit of background, the first sequencer I used was CV/Gate.  I then used MIDI hardware sequencers (and software on Atari and Amiga), owned one of the first MIDI equipped synths (and I also bought Roland's first MIDI synth), and worked extensively in the eighties with a Simmons kit (as a session drummer) triggering via MIDI.

This is true.  I talk about that in my earlier post.  One can syncopate with precision.  Controlled randomness can be quite expressive, particularly when complex patterns governed by intelligent harmonies are involved.  There is possibly a lack of technique, craft or musicianship, or all three, if the computer is not truly singing.   That wasn't true when computer music was just starting to happen, but it is now.  With great digital to analog converters, and digital clocks, 24-bit sample libraries consisting of hundreds of thousands to a million samples, softsynths that waveshape, oscillate, sequence, arpeggiate, and often produce truly beautiful tones--these are powerful, and very musical, tools.  It's how you use them that makes a difference, not that you use them.
 
http://www.jerrygerber.com/symphony8.htm

I'd still like to hear audio examples of what the OP is talking about because I'm still not convinced it's an issue, at least I've never heard anyone else mention it.

jb101
Where I see the OP's theory and Jeff's differ, is that the OP suggests that with other DAWs "It just sounds more ''alive'', less rigid, even when everything is hard quantized".
 
Surely, if Sonars timing was off, it would sound anything but "rigid".
 
I would have thought that something quantized 100% should sound "rigid", and if it sounds "alive, less rigid" then something is amiss.

Yes, while Jeff agreed the was a difference between DAWs my intrepretation of his observation was the opposite of how I intrepret the OP. Also Jeff was refereing to sloppy timing  issues when there is a heavy audio load in addition to MIDI, where the OP seems to be more concerned with just MIDI and it sounding too rigid.
 
My view is if you hard quantize a midi part it should sound mechanical and rigid. That's why the quantize function has a strength control.
 
I wonder if one reason clips sound differently in two DAWs could be related to velocity curves?????????

Hi Kwel, can you render the three version of the MIDI tracks into audio so we can take a listen for ourselves?  I am curious to hear this distinction between SONAR, Logic and Reason.  Logic Pro X is looking like an interesting option.
 
Kind regards,
 
Living Room Rocker

So, one of the odd things I have found in SONAR is in dense MIDI projects, the MIDI buffer setting needs tweaking.... what happens is that MIDI notes start dropping out during playback, so when you raise this buffer, the dropped out MIDI notes start triggering samples again.
 
Not sure what is going on internally but it would appear to me that this might have a relationship to the MIDI timing of the playback as well (or not).
 
Just thought I would mention this odd tidbit.
 
JK

The more midi data you have, the larger the buffer used to send the midi data needs to be. The amount of time it takes to compute the midi data and write it to a buffer is fixed. If you double the midi data and you can't process any faster, then the only thing you can do to compensate is to use more memory and begin filling it earlier.

It is the age old law of computers: the trade off between computation speed, size of memory used and computation time.

This is a weird thread - Hard quantizing is too rigid.
 
And yes, it sure does seem as though the OP's and Jeff's observations about MIDI timing are completely opposing.  If SONAR's MIDI timing was not as tight, I'm not sure how it could "feel" more rigid?  I've never had this experience myself so maybe I'm missing something.   Perhaps the OP should try S1, just to see if SONAR's "rigid" quantized playback is there as well or if S1 has a looser interpretation of what hard quantized notes should sound like.
 
 

There has to be some factor or factors why the OP feels like drum sequences sound more "alive" in Logic and Reason, whether real or imagined. I just very much doubt that the makers of those programs have deliberately coded some kind of default "musicality" into their MIDI timing. That would be imposing someone's idea of musicality on users and it just doesn't sound plausible. I mean what is this "musicality"? Is it slightly behind the beat or ahead of the beat? Making a decision like that in the context of a song would depend upon the style of music, the intended feeling, the drumming style etc. I'm pretty sure that if such timing idiosyncrasies were to be a feature of a DAW then they'd be offered as an option.