This week, I discovered an alarming MIDI latency issue in Cubase 9.5, whereby outboard hardware synthesizers are recording audio to Cubase with a delay of 10ms or more. More importantly, the latency varies from note to note by several milliseconds. Consequently, the problem can’t be fixed by merely dragging an audio track to compensate for the latency.
I noticed the trouble while working on some percussive material - the transients of VIs and outboard synths wouldn’t match up, even when the corresponding MIDI notes were quantized 100%. I tried the following:
- Reduced ASIO Buffer Size to 32 (minimum)
- Adjusted MIDI Latency Mode to Low (max MIDI performance)
- Enabled/Disabled Constrain Delay Compensation
These had some effect, but not enough. You can see in the attached screen capture a latency of 11.5 ms, with a variation of almost 4 ms. This is typical but far from the worst I’ve seen. Here, the “Raw MIDI Recording” and “Raw Audio Recording” tracks were recorded simultaneously, whereas “Re-recording #1” through “Re-recording #3” were recorded by playing back the aforementioned “Raw MIDI Recording” track, simply to demonstrate that the latency varies randomly with each pass. For the record, the Raw audio recording doesn’t always outperform the MIDI playback recordings. Occasionally, it’s actually slower!
Any ideas how to resolve or work around this? I recall reading somewhere that Cubase 10 addresses some “timing issues.” Can anyone verify if this has been addressed in Cubase 10?
Any assistance is appreciated.
] As usual, there’s plenty to be found on the subject, once you know what to look for.