Ok, the implication that cubase’s midi timing, good or bad, has anything to do with the hardware used doesn’t hold a lot of water with me. Are you really suggesting that the crystal clock of the converters (interface) is so unstable that cubase using it as a reference for its midi timing can’t keep up? Do you know how bad that clock would have to be. Midi has, what, 1/50th of the timing of a 44.1 clock?
Midi timing inside an application (not addressing external apps or midi sound sources) is a code thing-either cubase or the VI being used. Nuendo2 had some of the most truly hideous midi timing I’ve ever experienced. That said, cubase 4 and now 6 have been relatively stable for me.
I’ve not run the test here…and frankly, could point to GA1, which…well, I just don’t care. Not sure who uses that…however, I ran a test recently to prove a different point to a friend.
Played a track live (clav so it would have some nice transients)-I simultaneously recorded the audio and midi. Then I rerecorded the audio of the midi track. Then I did a third bounce offline. The a forth and fifth in real time but with several reverence and t-racks issues (latency compensation inducing plugs) on OTHER tracks in the project.
Points proved:
C6’s ADC worked 100%
And my point I was actually making-NOTHING replicated the live audio.
Questionable thing:
While all Three real time bounces nulled, and the two offline nulled to each other, they did NOT null between real time and offline. This could very well be due to Scarbee’s K4 scripting being “timing sensitive” and offline does mess with time. Like if it were “don’t play the same variation within 100ms of each other”, bouncing offline could throw that kind of scripting off. I’ve also found that bfd2 doesn’t bounce properly offline all the time, so I just DON’T…real time saves time in the long run because it’s always what you hear.
Anyway…the thing I was trying to prove, and did? You can LOOK at the audio versus the midi rendered to audio and see–some hits in the midi are early, some late. I was making the point that you should be recording audio rather than midi for anything you can play with your ten fingers. Midi, in this day and age should be for programming things you can’t play…drums, horns, strings-things more about programming than playing. The side effect I learned was that cubase 6 on win7x64 is as good as you can ask from a midi sequencer in being consistent in playback timing.
Fwiw, c2quad, 8gb, nvidia mobo chipset, motu 5x5, echogina3g. Kontakt 4–don’t rembrandt the last update I did, maybe with Alicia’s Keys 1.2? I remember 4.1 because it enabled the background loading…I tend to not update unless there’s an issue or worthwhile feature…still on c6.0.
Anyway…try your test with a third party sampler. See if you still have the issue. If not, it’s likely ga1…what are you using in studio one and protools? I’m really picky about midi timing. C4&6, I’ve had no real issues, save offline bouncing…which I resolve by getting a cup of coffee while it bounces in real time!