Trying to work out if this delay is normal...

[pSeudoCyst]

Hi all.

I'm recording the output of an instrument track (midi drums) as a live performance and when I review the take I've just recorded, I'm finding there's a considerable delay between what I monitored during the take and what's printed in the session.

The midi from my v-drums is feeding into an instrument track with Addictive drums as the instrument plugin. The inst track output is bused into an audio track where it's recorded. I'm monitoring the audio track output.

Ive attached a screenshot to represent the delay - the difference between midi note and audio transient is about 2000 samples.

I'm on a high spec machine, h/w buffer is set low, and as I said, monitoring live is absolutely fine so I'm unsure why the printed audio is so far behind.

Any idea if this normal PT behavior? Or what I can do to compensate for this?

Thanks!

[albee1952]

So, you're recording midi AND audio in the same pass? If so, try just recording the midi(on the Instrument track). Then use Track Commit on the Instrument track and see if that is also offset. Just wondering if its the routing/recording(which has been known to be an issue on many systems).

FWIW, I used to do a lot of Virtual drums on a TD-10 Roland kit with Addictive Drums, SD2 and EZdrummer, and all 3 worked quite well. I would track the midi only(on a stereo Instrument track). Then go thru the piano roll and make any edits or quantize changes. Once that was done, I would split the kit pieces out to a batch of individual audio tracks and print them. I never noticed the offset you are seeing, but in all honesty, it might have been happening, but might also be small enough to go unnoticed

I would also measure the offset so you can know the exact amount to nudge the audio(I know that's a workaround for something that should not happen, but.....)

[pSeudoCyst]

Cheers for the advice!

There's no delay at all when committing the track from a pre-recorded midi clip, so the original issue is indeed down to recording midi and audio simultaneously.

Specifically, I've found the delay is added in the busing of the instrument track output to the audio track input.

I found a fix - AD has it's own busing built inside the plugin, which you can route to the input of the audio track, and the delay is significantly less - from 2000 samples down to 200, which is just about a manageable latency.

What's interesting, is by just having the original (external) bus open, even if not in use, adds that 2000 sample delay to the printed audio... I've had to take the bus out of the channel strip completely to make the fix work.

[its2loud]

Is your delay compensation turned on?

[albee1952]

Interesting... Back to the open bus for a moment, a send on a track that has no destination will cause almost 2000 samples of erroneous compensation(say you put a send on a vocal, feeding an AUX track with a delay plugin. Then changed your mind and deleted the AUX track but left the send. That would mess ADC up