midi 2 audio delay?

[Guest n604]

Hi guys,

 

I'm using cubase SX on windows XP with an Echo LAYLA 24 soundcard. And my comp is a PIII with 256RAM. I have the following problem: I sequence a melody, trigger it with a sound from my hardware synth, record it to audio... And there's a delay... you can see it visually, the recorded audio is not alligned to the barline,... I know this is latency issue..

My latency is around 11ms, which is not that bad..

 

My question is... am I suppose to leave the audio like that? Or just cut that 11ms of silence off and drag the audio back to the barline every single time? Is there any other solution? Even if other soundcards have lower latencies like 2-4ms, that is still 2-4ms delay, its not perfect...

 

This is driving me nuts, I've done all the research I could about this... All the forums and websites just talk about how to lower the latency to 2-12ms... But then what? Is it a waste of time to fix it up perfectly?

 

Do you all get this kinda problem? My friend says, he never had this problem, the audio starts dead on the beat... Some people told me it has something to do with the cables transmiting the signal too slow.. but my cables are not long, midi cables are 5.5 feet, audio cables are 6 feet long...

Is there a solution?

 

Thanks for the help...

[Guest Mike Indidginus]

Try setting a preroll of a bar or 2 to give it a bit of leeway. That might help. But to be honest I have similar problems with audio not being recorded bang-on. I usually leave it (as it is only marginal & most folk aren't going to be able to tell the nanosecond that it is out), unless it's something like a bassline (where I was advised by my gOOOD friend Colin to recycle it & quantize it so that it's spot on). Hope you get it sorted

[Colin OOOD]

This is probably not soundcard latency, as most sequencers (and certainly Cubase) automatically compensate for latency when recording. I have heard that SX has problems syncing MIDI recordings with audio, and that this has been fixed in version 1.03 (although I still use VST 5.1), so maybe upgrade?

 

However, what it could also be is the latency of your hardware MIDI synth. Even with hardware there is a short delay between receiving a MIDI message and the corresponding sound coming out. Pre-VST, this was never a problem as it was the norm and there was no way to compensate for it except by ear; when you can see the waveform you've just recorded, though, it becomes very obvious! By all means, chop off the silence and re-align your audio, but check first that all the audio is out by the same amount. I quite often do this as there is nothing quite as satisfying as kick, bass and snare in sample-accurate sync

 

Hope this helps.

 

Colin