External audio, midi latency and CPA9

[mrx]

Scenario:

A song with two tracks of MIDI (bass and drums) that I saved as an SMF.

Converted the SMF to a 16 bit mono, 44.1KHz wav with Roland Virtual Sound Canvas.

Imported the WAV into a Fostex MR-8 for a guide track (setting the tempo map to match).

Recorded some guitars into the MR-8 (everything sounds fine).

Loaded up Cake with the above MIDI data (this time being played back through a Roland MBD-1 module).

Imported the guitar tracks (16 bit mono, 44.1 KHz wavs) from the MR-8 into Cake.

When playing back, the guitar tracks are in sync with each other, but ever so slightly "off" with the MIDI. Offsetting the MIDI tracks by a touch made things a little sound better.

Question - has anyone else experienced this when importing audio into Cakewalk, and if so, does the MIDI just need a slight nudge in order to lock everything up tight in sync?

Thanks for any thoughts or ideas!

 

[James Argo]

In some "less" powerfull machine, using an internal synth (Soundfonts, VSC, DXi, etc...) will tend to "slow down" the tempo abit. Almost unnoticeable. In MIDI only project, you may not hear the difference (unless you load bunch of MIDI tracks using internal synth). But if you sync 'em with imported audio track, it will be heard. I believe it's not actually SONAR bugs, it just requires a better machine. However, it can be solved by offseting the MIDI track you mentioned. ...Anyway, have you changed the Clock source to Audio (Options --> Project... --> Clock) after you imported the audio to MIDI project ?


Jaymz

 

[mrx]

Yea, I've done all the obvious stuff. Plus the virtual stuff was just used to convert the MIDI to wav. The sync problem is when using an external Roland rack mount module for MIDI tone generation.

I've been disgusted with Cakewalk for a long time and this has been the push I needed to go digging, so I'll give n-Track a shot. With some of the earliest versions of Cakewalk Pro Audio I had way more tracks (audio and MIDI) all playing and recording great on a P90 (ninety, NOT nine hundred) with a Turtle Beach card. Now I have a 500MHz box with 256MB RAM and an Event card and even MIDI (with no audio) often skips during the first couple bars. I see people with machines way better than mine complaining on these forums everyday, so I'm really starting to think that Cakewalk has gotten too 'feature rich', and forgotten that it means nothing if you can't even play back a couple tracks.

Now that I'm ranting - I literally had more stable MIDI performance on a Commodore 64, so I find it inconceivable that I have to tweak buffers 20 years later! There are guys on the n-Track site talking about recording a dozen audio tracks at once while monitoring another 16 - I can see having to 'tweak' a machine in that case, but NOT when trying to get a mono wav file to sync to a MIDI file with drums and bass. It's insane.