Abnormal MIDI Instrument Track Latency

CaseyCayce

New member
I’ve been having problems with a MIDI drum track for several days now. While recording, low latency monitoring and delay compensation are both off. Buffer size is 512 and I’m running no plugins. I’m using Superior Drummer with all drum instruments/mics routed to separate tracks in PT, a standard setup I’ve used for years with no issues. I record the MIDI track with a Yamaha CP40, get a great playback, quantize, and I'm off to work on other audio tracks. But as soon as I disengage the record button on the MIDI drum track, there’s a latency of about 300 ticks applied to the playback. That’s just about a third of a beat of latency just for releasing the record button, throwing everything off.

To correct this I have to engage the Delay Compensation, putting the MIDI track back in sync. When I do that, though, any other track I try and record on has the same amount of latency applied to the input signal, no matter what my buffer setting, or whether low latency monitoring is engaged. My input signal is delayed by the same 300 ticks.

Today I upgraded from 2018.7 to 2019.6 hoping that would solve the problem but it didn't. My project is on hold until I can get this worked out, and I'm under a deadline. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Pro Tools 2019.6
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
4 GHz Intel Core i7
32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
3 External Monitors: 27", 24" & 65"
 
Hi,
Can you tell us a bit more about the session, and the history?
Is this entire process, start to finish, something that worked just fine and is now suddenly playing up?
If not, what's new/different?

But as soon as I disengage the record button on the MIDI drum track, there’s a latency of about 300 ticks applied to the playback.

Relative to what?
Do you have other recorded audio for reference, or a click track?

Is it just the audio that's delayed or are the actual midi notes later/farther right than they should be?
You mentioned quantising. Any chance your settings in there are doing something odd? Maybe leave that step out for the duration of troubleshooting/testing.

Finally which plugins, if any, are introducing a delay?
Protools mix window tells you and shows the exact amount in orange and, if delay compensation is enabled, shows you the applied offset to all other tracks in green.
If you don't see it, click the menu at the bottom left and tick "Delay Compensation" to enable that view.


I'm sitting at ProTools here trying to force it to mess up like you describe, but I can't.
The worst I can do is intentionally introduce lots of plugin delay then enable ADC and record but, even then, it records me in perfect time; I just hear it late (as expected).
Even deliberately recording with a really large buffer, I still get a recording right on the beat but hear it late whilst recording. Playback is fine.
 
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