When I record my guitar audio track against a midi track I imported from elsewhere, the audio playback runs slower than the midi. I played it in time to the midi but playback is about a second out after 3 minutes. What can I do?
There are probably better ways to do this and I am not a Midi expert- If nothing else, maybe this answer will get someone to tell you a better, more correct way -
that said: until a few years ago you could not play/record midi and wave file audio together at all. Each process wants to run at different speeds (read latency.)
Thigns to try - go into the settings menu. Under the Options tab and the heading “Use system timer for” uncheck the boxes for Playback Time and Recording Time - this makes your recording interface (sound card) run the audio clock. Go to the Midi Setting Tab and under “Timer to use” select Wave. If that doesn’t help, try the System timer for each and then both.
If that does not work:
If you can get you audio latency (buffers) low enough to record a wav file to match an existing wav track, I’d suggest you convert the midi recording to a wav file and work to that. You might check in the Settings menu of Midi and see if they anything else to effect the settings.
Thanks, Bax3. I’ll try this.
Here’s another thought. The MIDI track will play at the tempo set in n-Tracks. Change the tempo and the MIDI tracks tempo will change. Normally when a MIDI track is imported the tempo will be set to what’s in the MIDI file.
The wave file will play at the tempo it was recorded. Changing tempo in n-Tracks will not change playback speed. If the MIDI file and wave file are playing at slightly different tempos then that’s a possibility.
This would be a drifting out of sync if the tempos aren’t perfect, or a drastic getting out of sync if the tempos are way out. In both cases the pitch should not seen wrong. If the tracks are not in pitch then the wave file is not playing at the correct sample rate (assuming no pitch bend or other funky MIDI event issues). But, if it’s out just a little there may not be enough pitch shift to hear.
There’s also other more obscure reasons that can cause this, such as the timers on the two machines being different.
Of course, if the problem is latency then the tracks will be uniformly out of sync, but not drift further and further apart.
When you say the recorded track runs slower and say it’s out about a second after 3 minutes, I feel like you are hitting the issue where the two machines clocks aren’t exactly the same. I’ve had this happen when trading files and haven’t found a good solution, or actually proven the cause. The idea is if a machine is running “fast” then waves play back on that machine will sound perfect, but when played back on a change running just a little “slower” then the track swill take just a little longer to play. The reason being that the clocks are not perfectly 44100, but 43999 or 44101, for example.
I’ve seen hardware that played waves back as much as a 1/4 step wrong. The hardware was very cheap.
Bax’s suggestions are great, especially the ones about the timer settings… Rerecord something just like you did before, with different timer settings to see if any way if better than the other. I bet one way will be a lot better than the other.