PC timing issues

[dougstronach]

hello all: system time stamp has been activated and deactivated -- didn't make a difference (i forget the exact results of that test right now but not the problem).I'll look into giga's buffers.T4MH -- There is no external MIDI chain -- internal via rewire or the old way with GIGA as standalone and using virtual MIDI ports caused the sloppiness in timing -- therefore an internal computer issue. I was using external MIDI ports through a Roland UM-4 USB box until I read that USB boxes in particular are usually pretty sloppy with timing. I limit it's use now to just getting MIDI info into the computer and then quantizing/editing inside if I need to.I, like some others, swear that the MIDI timing on my ATARI 1040st running Notator was tighter than what we have now. Also, MIDI timing with internal cards like PCI and ISA (which over the years we were forced to drop as machines changed) were handling the timing better.It's looking like I'll just have to live with it. VSTi seems to be the way to go in terms of timing. The giga thing bugs me though as I have a lot of expensive sounds tied up in that now-abandoned software.I'll look into MIDI over Lan to run GIGA on a 2nd machine and see how that goes.out of interest, I also just found out that running direct-x plug-ins inside cubase will cause delays in the timing. seems that direct-x plug-ins don't report to cubase any inheritant delays caused by the plug-in so the system has no way to compensate for them. This is different to vst plug-ins which all state the internal latency of the plug-in to Cubase and Cubase adjusts for it. A direct-x wrapper is needed then to make them all vst plugins.The difference in timing with say, autotune as a direct-x plug-in is over 100 samples -- again significant. The more tests I do the more hair I lose! I have been running autotune this way for years now -- aaaghhh!!!!!Software companies are very shy to tell us about any flaws the system and software may have although it's clear they know about them -- Steinberg has now stopped offering direct-x plug-in support in SX4 and higher.thanks for all your posts,doug s.

[mojobone]

You'll be happy to know that the Giga technology hasn't been abandoned; it's been bought/licensed by Garritan Instruments.If you can determine the latency of each plug-in it should be a constant which you can compensate for with a manual timing offset, but I suspect you knew that already. You might also try using the plugs within Giga, see if it helps.

[dougstronach]

thanks mojobone. Good news about GIGA -- I'll look into that.The whole investigation has been really interesting to me -- not sure I completely trust my PC anymore (any computer for that matter). Will be double-checking its actions from now on!I wonder is there's a set of tests that can be run to check the timing of your PC? I had to check several parts of the system to know what they were all doing -- external MIDI, internal MIDI, vsti, REWIRE, Audio, audio with VST plugins, Audio with direct-x plugins, GIGA and so on. Really each plugin needed to be checked individually and then you have to ask yourself does that latency change as the load on the computer is increased?Because the latencies are so small in most cases it is hard to hear (especially when your head is into a song and not really thinking about subtleties in timing) but together they must all add up to something. Like I said, the tightness of my recordings improved once I started to be aware of latencies inside and outside the computer and made some different decisions in my work flow to improve timing.thanks again for all your posts,doug s.