Which Daw has the tightest internal midi?

[dodokvr]

do people nowadays have problems with timing and their daws?

I've switched it on later than I intended to on more than one occasion.

[siriusbliss]

IMO tightest MIDI timing was on the hardware sequencers of old. Then, even the early cards from even Creative Labs running under DOS were lock-tight for MIDI. Microsoft comes along with bloat (and Mac OS as well), and MIDI gets overlayed with other clock cycles and interrupts.

Nowadays I still avoid USB for MIDI interfaces, and opt for RME or other good interface with good clock that has direct MIDI (or PCI, which IMO is still tighter).

Then - as far as DAWs are concerned - they ALL should be lock-tight nowadays, since otherwise it would be a waste of time and effort getting everything to work in a tightly locked fashion.

I use mainly Samplitude, which is great, and Live gets sluggish when you throw tons of MIDI traffic and sysex at it.

Overall, perhaps the MIDI-only sequencers should be perfect, since they don't have to also process audio and clocking requirements.

Greg

[justin3am]

do people nowadays have problems with timing and their daws?

I do in Live, but only when using external gear. Especially when the external gear needs to sync up to an external clock. Using midi within Live has always been fine for me, it's just sending and receiving midi it has trouble with.

[JoseC.]

I was under the impression that internal midi is sample accurate..?

+1...I think this is a non issue, I have never heard of anyone complain of midi tightness. If you ask me the question is the same as asking which lake has wettest water. No offense intended towards the OP.

Maybe you just were not listening. This is a real issue if you want to use MIDI for what it was intended, i.e. connecting and synchronizing music gear. Of course you just do not have it if you do not try to interface anything and stay within the box, but that is tantamount as saying that your sex life is perfect as long as you only have sex with yourself.

I do a fair bit of sequencing with an Emu MP7 and if I try to record it into Live or Reaper receiving clock from those DAWs everything gets recorded late while with Sonar it gets right on spot with a 1.5-3ms error, both if I record the MP7 audio or its midi output. The delay I get with those other two is exactly the audio buffer, which apparently is some design choice made by the developers of those apps in order to get the internal timing right at the cost of screwing the external interfacing.

BTW, the MP7 is connected to the midi ports of an Emu 1616m soundcard, so there is no USB involved here, and as I said it is extremely tight with Sonar, which after all used to be a MIDI sequencer.

[IIRs]

I do a fair bit of sequencing with an Emu MP7 and if I try to record it into Live or Reaper receiving clock from those DAWs everything gets recorded late ... The delay I get with those other two is exactly the audio buffer,

Pretty sure you can set up an offset in Reaper: set it the same as your buffer size.

[justin3am]

I do a fair bit of sequencing with an Emu MP7 and if I try to record it into Live or Reaper receiving clock from those DAWs everything gets recorded late ... The delay I get with those other two is exactly the audio buffer,

Pretty sure you can set up an offset in Reaper: set it the same as your buffer size.

You can also compensate for that latency in Live in a few different ways, but you can't compensate for the jitter that is introduced at various stages between Live's software midi output and the hardware midi input of any give piece of gear.

[JoseC.]

Sure I can compensate but the point is that that latency should not be there. External midi timing should not be tied to the audio buffer.

[Hink]

I was under the impression that internal midi is sample accurate..?

+1...I think this is a non issue, I have never heard of anyone complain of midi tightness. If you ask me the question is the same as asking which lake has wettest water. No offense intended towards the OP.

Maybe you just were not listening. This is a real issue if you want to use MIDI for what it was intended, i.e. connecting and synchronizing music gear. Of course you just do not have it if you do not try to interface anything and stay within the box, but that is tantamount as saying that your sex life is perfect as long as you only have sex with yourself.

Perhaps you just wern't reading and comprehending what you read Hint, check the thread title. I have to tell you, I have a hearing problem, I don't hear people who talk down to me as if I'm clueless thank you very much.

Edit: from the first post

I dont mean for triggering external synths or modules, just internal VSTs/Audio units.

[amiga909]

I dont mean for triggering external synths or modules, just internal VSTs/Audio units.[/size]

ur right about the thread title, sorry.
however, i believe this question is useless: (mostly) of course all DAWs have proper internal midi processing. sample-accurate, as said before.
the question starts becoming interesting here: things can get slightly troublesome with recording midi data from external midi devices. mainly because of sloppy programming (OS, driver, host).
further: slaving a DAW to an external midi clock is very troublesome.

still i am curious why some software, as reported by Jose seems so much weaker (Reaper, Live; Usine partly too btw) than on other (Sonar; surely Cubase too) - while it seems to be a simple task that was mastered by 20y. old systems with ease?

[Hink]

I dont mean for triggering external synths or modules, just internal VSTs/Audio units.[/size]

ur right about the thread title, sorry.
however, i believe this question is useless: (mostly) of course all DAWs have proper internal midi processing. sample-accurate, as said before.
the question starts becoming interesting here: things can get slightly troublesome with recording midi data from external midi devices. mainly because of sloppy programming (OS, driver, host).
further: slaving a DAW to an external midi clock is very troublesome.

still i am curious why some software, as reported by Jose seems so much weaker (Reaper, Live; Usine partly too btw) than on other (Sonar; surely Cubase too) - while it seems to be a simple task that was mastered by 20y. old systems with ease?

it's all good, it wasn't you that responded I agree with btw, that's why I said it's like asking which lake has the wettest water.

I have no idea why this guy though it appropriate to respond to me with a comment like "maybe you weren't listening". Arrogance at it's finest

[robbie1234321]

I was under the impression that internal midi is sample accurate..?

So was I.

So shouldn't this make any Daw incapable of sloppy timing when triggering internal soft synths...?

[pljones]

I was under the impression that internal midi is sample accurate..?

So was I.

So shouldn't this make any Daw incapable of sloppy timing when triggering internal soft synths...?

It should be internally consistent. When you mixdown, you should be able to look at the audio output really closely and see how tight it is compared with the MIDI events that created it. However, if you're monitoring it in real-time against an external source, that's going to show a different picture.

[robbie1234321]

i've had loads of hassles with midi clock sync with computer+hardware setups.
i'd like to propose a theory, lemme know if its correct.

I was under the impression that internal midi is sample accurate..?

thats true.

I think that midi that is in the daw will play back with perfect accuracy.

this is half-true. internally midi data is always in sync (= sample accurate). but this doesnt mean its perfectly tight. means: a 120bpm, 4/4, 1bar loop isnt always exactly 2s. this is called jitter, means: latencies are always perfectly compensated internally, yet these latencies do not always have exactly the same duration. this is easily understandable if u look at cpu overload situations.
however, this isnt that grave if u have the computer as master.

IF what your saying is true then it is a grave situation because all those little timing shifts (Jitter play havoc with the groove of a song). I dont even know what jitter is

[robbie1234321]

Which Daw do you think has the tightest midi? Or even which one do you think is sloppy. I dont mean for triggering external synths or modules, just internal VSTs/Audio units.

Robbie1234321

Fruityloops/FLStudio has always has adjustable ppq. I think it defaults to 96. I believe this is the max that MPC can deliver.

Have fun, Mark

Yes Fl studio has a distinct feel to its internal midi timing. I only recently tried the demo and there was no doubt it was tight in an MPC sort of way. I actually had no idea until recently that all Daws were not as equal in the groovyness dept.

[LawrenceF]

Except for early on with Cubase before learning about the "ignore port filter" thing I don't ever recall playing midi and thinking on playback that it ever sounded "off"... so I don't stress over midi timing.

And yes, Reaper's midi is (was) tied to audio buffer latency. I didn't like that either... there is (or was) no direct midi through. I say "was" since that may have changed since the last time I checked, they move kinda fast over there.

It struck me that in Cubase I could run max buffers and still have "0 latency" midi... e.g. direct thru to hardware. In Reaper I got the same latency as the audio system. That was not workable for me... hardware midi being subjected to latency like VSTI's.

Midi thru (I thought) was a hardware driver function like ASIO DM, where the midi thru stream is output from the hardware before the DAW. In Reaper it apparently goes through the DAW... like (and with) the audio buffers.