Which Daw has the tightest internal midi?

[IIRs]

I think there are two different concepts getting confused here..

The term "jitter" usually refers to variations in the sample clock driving the ADC/DAC, and the audible effects of this are increased distortion rather than any lack of "grooviness". Thats what I was talking about in my post above.

I think the RME article is refering to midi timing jitter, which is rather different. Might I suggest that if you continue to use the term jitter, qualify it as "midi jitter" or "latency jitter" as RME do to avoid confusion.

[stonestreet]

most of the jitter you'll see only on live-playback when using a daw, i.e. playing a soft synth and listening. almost exactly as noticable as your audio latency. and almost the same thing. what gets recorded should be fine (if the daw of your choice is a good choice)

Im not so sure about that. It would mean what your hearing (musically) cannot be trusted. Ive never noticed a different feel after rendering in any software.

I remember my first journey into computer assisted music making with my Creative Soundblaster and Cubase VST 5. I recorded a midi sequence and on playback it was awful. Eventually I found out that it had recorded and automatically quantized. I soon learnt to switch that off. Iguess my playing was a bit loose!!

Have fun, Mark

[JoseC.]

edit: surely your first words were antogonistic towards me and based on you taking my post completely out of context. I know what most people would say after that.

Nope, sorry. You took things personally, and that's where you went wrong. Maybe my reply "Maybe you were not listening" to your "I have never heard..." somehow sounded antagonistic to you, but it wasn't meant to be. I probably should have sprinkled some smilies over this, but I sometimes forget doing that. Then you got antagonistic yourself, and arrogant, too, IMO, which led to this silly exchange of verbal jabs. Let's better forget about it.

About what is on/off topic, well, I guess I am entitled to have my opinion on that, and that is what I did express.

[JoseC.]

Now you need an I7 with 4gb of ram and a quad processor to do something similar. Back then we made regular trips to the local second-hand music store for used sound modules... we had huge stacks of them.

Exactly, not to mention that now your "instruments" are suddenly declared obsolete by somebody (the manufacturer, or, worse, Microsoft ) They are succeeding in planting the idea in people's brains that gear is disposable, and its cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. BTW, in case somebody did not notice, Firewire is already on its way out...

[Hink]

Now you need an I7 with 4gb of ram and a quad processor to do something similar. Back then we made regular trips to the local second-hand music store for used sound modules... we had huge stacks of them.

Exactly, not to mention that now your "instruments" are suddenly declared obsolete by somebody (the manufacturer, or, worse, Microsoft ) They are succeeding in planting the idea in people's brains that gear is disposable, and its cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. BTW, in case somebody did not notice, Firewire is already on its way out...

not single word of that makes sense, maybe because primarily I'm a guitarist. In all my years have I never considered gear disposable (except for guitar picks, drum sticks, tubes and for some people guitar strings*), I have considered things obsolete and/or expendable but that is simply due to my own evolution and growth as an artist. What examples might you have of "disposable" gear? Software certainly is never "disposable", disposable is something that is designed to discarded after it's use. Are you sure you didn't mean obsolete and/or planned obsolescence? That makes more sense imo because you did say obsolete first.

I'm a little confused by your statement about Firewire, how is it on the way out?

*I rather hate to part with guitar strings, sure they are disposable but more so to others than me. I've got a few guitars, in June of 07 I bought a box of 25 sets of strings...it still has more than 20 sets. I consider my strings barely broken in

[Hink]

edit: surely your first words were antogonistic towards me and based on you taking my post completely out of context. I know what most people would say after that.

Nope, sorry. You took things personally, and that's where you went wrong. Maybe my reply "Maybe you were not listening" to your "I have never heard..." somehow sounded antagonistic to you, but it wasn't meant to be

but as it were we were not even talking about the same thing, you interjected with something completely different than the topic, I was addressing the topic. So please forgive me, I can't see where I went wrong. It's okay to say you mispoke, I know we all do and most other people have no problem correcting themselves.

FWIW I don't disagree with your point, in fact maybe what you should do is go back to page 1 of this thread and see what the first response was. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it's hard enough on the internet at times to carry on reasonable discussions, but when someone comes up with something out of left field it just confuses things. I'm not saying going off topic is bad, but perhaps before you start out with a statement like that you should express that it's off topic.

[JackD]

Atari STE with Cubase Version 3.

Gentlemen, we have a winner. Good luck with support.

[robbie1234321]

Shame the discussion didnt get to the actual point, but thats ok, I enjoyed reading all your points.

I was hoping we could have had a deeper convo on the differences between DAWs midi and how all those midi parts running live from teh DAWs sequencer could? mess up the very subtle interactions between instruments timing. In fact it may not even be the midi its self, but how the coding (coders) have worked it out.

We all absolutely trust our Daws midi and how and who programmed them, but I have always been a little sceptical since my very first day programming midi in a DAW.

I have come to the conclusion that regardless if your Daw has sample accurate timing, and even if it looks spot on if once the VST sound shave been rendered as audio THERE IS STILL something not always right. Dont get me wrong a couple of DAWs out there are bang on and they will give you the feel. But there are others which wont, no matter how hard you try. and no matter how many hours you edit notes, and mess with Groove you will not get that special thing. Of course this all really matters on the music you make. If ambient scapes is your thing then its irrelevant. It applies mostly to quantised electronic/pop.dance music for the most part

[goldenanalog]

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.

This is a fun question/discussion!

Does anybody even remember what the midi spec is?

Here's this:

http://www.midi.org/techspecs/index.php

Speed? Using this ref:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_In ... _Interface

midi 1.0 is 31.25 Kbits/sec!

Point: midi data is inherently 'different' in a DAW/Tracker; it may look & work like midi, but it really isn't.

Reason: CPU's work in literally 1,000,000,000's of cycles per second; so internally control info is handled several orders of magnitude faster then any hardware midi device, which is what the midi spec was originally designed for.

Dig?

In my experience, timing errors on any decent DAW can all but be zero'd out, by remembering that ANY computer DAW is a combination of software and hardware...a lot of timing problems are hardware/software combination-specific....the effectiveness in dealing with all of these problems in total is a function of the sophistification/persistence of the user(s).

In other words: 'intelligent' trial and error.

OK, an example: Using an M-audio Audiophile Card, we were able to deduce through a series of self-created tests that the hardware processes all audio with an inherent 'non-defeatable' 44-byte buffer; which means that we had to shift all recorded 16-bit audio audio 44 samples *back* (rec + pb) in each track to neutralize the sound-card-hardware buffer's effect on latency.

I'll stop there.

Please continue!

-goldenanalog

[LawrenceF]

Never mind... I suppose you're talking about how a hardware device like a keyboard responds to those streams in comparison to a VSTI. Hardware sequencers certainly have CPU's, but I think I get your point.

[JoseC.]

you interjected with something completely different than the topic,

Ummm...it is not "completely different". Topic is (was?) about midi timing, and though the OP said "internal", my whole point is that midi is midi, be it "internal" or "external", I think that I already made that clear.

And now, on with our REALLY OFF TOPIC SECTION:

I am surprised to hear of somebody who discards amp tubes after use (just kidding... ) Anyway, if "planned obsolescence" makes what I said clearer, that's fine for me. When I said "gear", I obviously meant computer related gear and software instruments.

About Firewire, well, while USB 3.0 is just around the corner, it does not look like number of Firewire ports in computers is going to grow any day soon, and Firewire 800 is rare. I'd say FW is dying. Want to bet?

[Hink]

So you're simply stating your opinion on Firewire. gotcha. I can't imagine Firewire going anywhere to soon and P-cal (PC Audio Labs) offers Firewire 800 on all their audio pcs. I think too many big players are too deep into Firewire for there to be much to worry about in the near future.

[Hink]

Shame the discussion didnt get to the actual point, but thats ok, I enjoyed reading all your points.

I was hoping we could have had a deeper convo on the differences between DAWs midi and how all those midi parts running live from teh DAWs sequencer could? mess up the very subtle interactions between instruments timing. In fact it may not even be the midi its self, but how the coding (coders) have worked it out.

We all absolutely trust our Daws midi and how and who programmed them, but I have always been a little sceptical since my very first day programming midi in a DAW.

I have come to the conclusion that regardless if your Daw has sample accurate timing, and even if it looks spot on if once the VST sound shave been rendered as audio THERE IS STILL something not always right. Dont get me wrong a couple of DAWs out there are bang on and they will give you the feel. But there are others which wont, no matter how hard you try. and no matter how many hours you edit notes, and mess with Groove you will not get that special thing. Of course this all really matters on the music you make. If ambient scapes is your thing then its irrelevant. It applies mostly to quantised electronic/pop.dance music for the most part

it's very simple to test, render a sequence, put the audio file directly below the midi and zoom in to see where your transients line up with midi notes. Make sure you use things with sharp attacks like drums.

[Download SOphist]

So you're simply stating your opinion on Firewire. gotcha. I can't imagine Firewire going anywhere to soon and P-cal (PC Audio Labs) offers Firewire 800 on all their audio pcs. I think too many big players are too deep into Firewire for there to be much to worry about in the near future.

i dunno Hink... when i was searching for a laptop i did not find ANY mainstream computer with a FW port. then, this USB 3 thing and eSATA coming along, it might be tempting to some manufacturers to take advantage of the inherent "awesome!" factor. it will take it's time, though.
sorry for the OT.

[goldenanalog]

A Pro Native DAW solution:

1.) Software:

http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/mu ... rsion.html

Test it.

2.) Host:

a.) Motherboard:

http://www.intel.com/performance/deskto ... treme_dual

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-BOXD5400XS- ... B0013LRLRK

b.) Processors:

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Processor-2 ... _e_title_3

You'll need (2) & they can comfortably be OC'd to 3.67ghz/core.

c.) Power Supply:

http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-CMPSU-750 ... _e_title_2

d.) Memory:

http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-FB-DIMM- ... 66&sr=1-22

You'll need (2).

e.) Video Card:

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-512-P3-N973- ... roduct_top

Solid.

f.) Disks:

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-C ... 894&sr=1-3

(2) for RAID.

3.) Audio hardware:

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdspe_madi.php

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_adi_8_qs.php

With slightly less then 30,000,000,000 cps (OC'd, combined) at your disposal, and your end-to-end computer resources well-managed, 'internal' vsti midi timing 'slop' in this DAW should never be a problem, unless it's grossly misconfigured.

Note: You MAY want to 'Hackintosh' it.

-goldenanalog