I purchased Cubase 12 Pro in the sale a few months ago. I feel I may have spent alot of money on an over hyped/rushed new version. A long time ago I used cubase every day to produce a lot of work. Back then we were all concerned with audio as the machines of the day could barely cope. Not a thought was given to midi. It was always rock solid.
Recently I have noticed that my work seemed “slushy”. Further examination showed that the midi notes recorded were way off the beat. Im a reasonably proficient keyboard player and can usually hit a mark ±6ms. The recordings were showing notes recorded upto 60ms before I had hit the key.
After several weeks of research I decided to do a few tests.
The first involved routing midi out to via a looped midi cable. Then based on various advice given in forums, articles and the knowledgebase here, tested various settings in Studio Setup. I tested lots of variations.
- Midi Port Setups including : Windows midi device, DirectMusic drivers, WinRT MIDI and emulated variants .
- The above with System Timestamp
- logical and random combinations of the above
The best result from the above test was approx ±3ms Jitter and lag of 6ms (Jitter incl) NB all notes placed later than control.
This I thought although not great was workable.
Then I tested each of the above combinations playing a midi controller through the interface. Wild !! Best I could achieve given variations of my playing was on average 20ms recorded before the note was “played”. This was frustrating. Which led to me reading further and testing all the suggestions I could find ie “setting up a daw on win 10” - Steinberg knowledge base, reinstalling the operating system, altering the bios, testing with RTL Utility, testing an alternative midi interface and controller (see below). Plus lots of variations with the Audio System settings in Studio Setup like turnig off Adjust for Record Latency, changing 64 to 32 bit float etc. The permutations of doing all of these tests is very time consuming. So pointers with explanations behind the reasoning would be very useful.
From my reading I believe that the metronome sounds a number of samples before the actual timing should be placed to take into consideration latency. I rendered the click and could get good midi recordings if I moved the audio forward and then recorded midi.
In conculsion, I believe the timing engine is miscalculating the number of samples and feeding that error to the metronome.
Equipment -
midi controller - Nord Lead 3 (plus tester - maudio 88 keystation pro)
Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 (2nd Gen) Firmware 1051 Driver 4.102.4
Cubase 12 Pro - Version 12.0.52 Build 393 - Built on Nov 24 2022
Windows 10 with all updates. Fresh install with microsoft bloatware removed and just the focusrite propriatry driver plus cubase 12.
Optiplex i7 6th gen 32gb ssd latest bios and firmware (dedicated audio machine)