Re: Deep question(s) regarding EDP, Sonar, Windows MIDI latency...

["Jesse Ray Lucas" <jlucas@neoprimitive.net>]

Haha -- for some reason, no one wants to discuss this thread on-list.  I
have gotten three very friendly and helpful mails, all addressed directly 
to
me.  :)  Thanks, guys.

Michael Stauffer, here, asks if I'm sending sysex commands to the EDP.  The
answer is no.  I'm sending simple MIDI note commands for functions like
Record, Overdub, Loop1, NextLoop, etc.

I do have MIDI-OX, which is another piece of the puzzle I forgot to 
mention.
Because I have no MIDI patchbay, I have to use MIDI-OX to create a virtual
one, allowing me to share a MIDI port to use my sampler's patch editor (on
the computer), an FCB1010, and a PC1600X, and pipe MIDI clock to the 
sampler
and EDP.  That's another possible source of latency.  However, even when I
wasn't using MIDI-OX, I was getting erratic behavior.

-J


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Stauffer" <michael@circular-logic.com>
To: "Jesse Ray Lucas" <jlucas@neoprimitive.net>
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 1:36 PM
Subject: RE: Deep question(s) regarding EDP, Sonar, Windows MIDI latency...


> Jesse,
>
> I don't think that the timing latencies in Sonar should be effecting your
> midi playback accuracy. With the newer WDM drivers the timing is supposed
> to be very good, good enough that the latencies and variance shouldn't be
> noticeable on the level of what you're talking about. But I've never done
> serious timing stuff with Sonar, so it's just what I've read. There are
> of course lots of subtle issues with optimizing Sonar for timing on a
> particular system.
>
> I suggest posting to the Sonar forum on cakewalk's site if you haven't
> already. If you can reproduce the timing errors with a more traditional
> midi sequence (I'm assuming your EDP commands are sysex strings?) then it
> might be easier to debug. If the timing errors only occur in tracks with
> EDP command messages, then maybe it's the length of the EDP command
> strings, or something particular to sysex messages in Sonar? How many
> bytes are they? Maybe they're broken up into smaller packets in Sonar's
> queue, and that throws things off. Maybe Sonar optimizes timing by not
> guaranteeing accurate timing for sysex msgs? Just thinking out loud.
>
> MidiOx is a great midi testing utility if you don't already ahve it. It'd
> make it easy to test output timing of midi events straight from Sonar via
> virtual midi device, allowing you to test separate of any problems the
> physical midi output port has (which are unlikely to be the problem).
>
> Have you tried slaving another sequencer program, maybe a very simple
> one, to Sonar and having the slaved sequencer send out the EDP commands?
>
> HTH,
> Michael
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Jesse Ray Lucas [mailto:jlucas@neoprimitive.net]
> >Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 9:43 PM
> >To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
> >Subject: Deep question(s) regarding EDP, Sonar, Windows MIDI latency...
> >
> >
> >For a year now I've been using my EDP with Sonar running on a Windows XP
> >machine and have been experiencing inconsistent behavior from
> >it.  I have
> >sent a lot of mails to the list describing various problems I
> >have had and
> >either bored, or stumped everyone into mostly silence.
> >
> snip
> >QUESTION(S):  Is the sequencer (Sonar) sending MIDI data late
> >or early to
> >make up for latency of the audio tracks in a sequence?  Is this
> >lateness/earliness variable, or a fixed amount of time?  Could this be
> >causing the seemingly erratic behavior of sequenced EDP
> >commands?  In the
> >Mac/PC discussion on latency there was some discussion about Windows
> >inducing another level of latency to MIDI data, which Macs
> >somehow bypass.
> >Is there any way of measuring this latency?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>