Hi there
I’m pretty new to Renoise (a month or so) and am really enjoying the experience so far.
I mostly use hardware synths (currently a Nord Drum 2, Elektron Machinedrum, Elektron Analog Rytm, Mutable Instruments Ambika, Moog Minitaur, Waldorf XT and Nord Lead 2) and have been spending some time trying to get the MIDI timing tight for playback and for recording patterns as samples.
I have the Renoise MIDI instruments set to LineIn Ret and use the Line Input device on the track. I have Automatic Plugin Delay Compensation checked. So thatshould be the audio interface latency taken care of.
Renoise offers a couple places where you can compensate for further latency caused by the external MIDI gear (compensating for the time between the MIDI signal being sent from Renoise and the audio signal coming back andreaching the audio interface): there’s the MIDI output latency in the MIDI instrument settings, and there’s the track offset in the mixer.
OK . . . so to get the timing tight on all these externalsynths, I create a pattern with a note on the first step and then create a sample from the pattern, zoom in on the waveform and see if it starts right at the beginning of the sample.
Without any adjustment, I was expecting to see the waveform start alittle way along, which I would compensate for with some negative track latency. However, I was surprised to see with several pieces of gear that the waveform was chopped at the start because the synth was already playing the first note when the recording started. So to get it lined up, I had to add in some extra latency.
Huh? This seems very strange.
Maybe it’s to do with the audio interface latency setting in Renoise? I’m using OS X, so the only setting is ‘Latency’, which I can apparently freely adjust down to 2 ms. Atthe moment it’s set to 12 ms. In Logic, you set the buffer size you want to use and Logic tells you what the resultinglatency will be, so the Renoise setting seems odd, but I guess it just sets the buffer to achieve the desired latency?
Any ideas? I mean, I guess it’s not a problem having a positive latency for some MIDI instruments, but I don’t really understand how it’s working.
Thanks!