Quantisation problem in Reaper

[bmanic]

When you record MIDI, right click on the track record arm button and select: "Preserve PDC delayed monitoring in recorded items". Then, everything should line up better requiring less quantization later.

THIS! I'm pretty sure this is why you are seeing the offset. It is such a silly default. It should always default to preserving PDC delayed monitoring.

Sigh.. Reaper, love it but I always scratch my head about some of the default settings. No wonder people keep thinking it's unintuitive and weird.

Also, you can make it default so that every time you create a new track, that setting is automatically set. You do that in the Preferences/track defaults thing.

[jethrobull]

Interesting...
There is a big piece about that here,
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=178915

[ghostwhistler]

When you record MIDI, right click on the track record arm button and select: "Preserve PDC delayed monitoring in recorded items". Then, everything should line up better requiring less quantization later.

Thanks I'll try that as well. What is PDC?

[BertKoor]

What is PDC?

Plugin Delay Compensation.

To compensate latency reported by plugins everything is warped back.

[ghostwhistler]

Thanks for the help.

Is there any way to snap items in a song? These tips are great for future pieces, but for now I'mhaving to go through what i've written and make sure everything lines up which is rather tedious

[tony10000]

Here is another discussion on the Reaper forum:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php ... mpensation

[alberto_balsalm]

Interesting. Never knew about this setting, it's kinda important though. I didn't understand the explanation in those threads, but after tinkering with this setting myself, it's actually very simple:

Preserve PDC delayed monitoring in recorded items OFF (default setting):

Set your buffer size to something ridiculous like 4096 in order to get tons of latency. Playing like that is impossible, which is exactly what we want. Now turn the track's fader all the way down, enable the metronome while recording, start recording, and hit a single note on your keyboard in time with the metronome a couple of times. Reaper will record the exact timing of those MIDI signals as you hit the keyboard. The buffer-related latency is completely out of the picture when this PDC setting is off.

Preserve PDC delayed monitoring in recorded items ON:

Same thing as above, but all of your recorded notes will be delayed by the exact latency introduced by your buffer size.

In other words, when this setting is off, Reaper will record the MIDI in time with your key presses, not in time with the audio that the softsynth starts producing after you hit a key. When the setting is on, it will record "what you hear", i.e., it will shift the recording in time by the latency amount - the MIDI timings in the recorded MIDI item will correspond with when the softsynth starts outputting the sound, and not with when you pressed the physical key on your controller.