Playback cursor out of sync!

[Stephen Carter]

Apologies if I’ve missed any previous answer/s on same topic, have searched/read forum etc., but cannot find…

When playing back songs inside my DAW (Studio One Pro v3.5.6 Windows 10 Pro) the visual feedback i.e. cursor position is not in sync with the audio I’m listening to!

The cursor (both on the song track and/or the grid editor) is displaced from the audio by half a bar or so, which makes it very difficult to perform edits because the cursor is not on the note or block part that is sounding. The audio is synced fine.

I’m thinking that this might be a latency issue but Studio One (as I suspect most DAW’s) has latency compensation, this compensation however does not seem to extend to SD3 visuals.

Has anyone else experienced this, what is for me a serious issue and is there a fix?

Regards….

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

Topic

[John]

Hi,

which version number is displayed in the SD3 plugin interface (lower left corner)?

BR,
John

John Rammelt - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Stephen Carter]

SD3 version 3.1.2

Regards…

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[John]

OK,

your assumption about latency compensation indicates to me that you say the visual feedback of the cursor is ahead of time, or?
Does this happen in all your Studio One projects, even in a fresh one without anything but SD3 loaded?
What are your typical Project settings; sample rate, buffer size, etc?

BR,
John

John Rammelt - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Stephen Carter]

Hello John – thanks for taking the time to respond.

OK – Yes the cursor is visually ahead of time between 1/8th to 1/4 of a bar (song at 166 BPM) so the notes, which are in time (synced with the song) play after the cursor has passed them!

Yes this happens with all (well the three that I tried) projects but from memory it affects all of them.

No this does not occur if I start a new song with SD3 only and load the same SD3 song-track. No, it does not occur with SD3 in stand-alone mode. In both of these modes the latency reported by Studio One is 0.3ms, which is significantly lower than the reported latency when playing in a full S1song (project) where for SD3 it is 40 – 50ms.

Sample rate 44.1kHz
Block size 2048 samples
Not sure about buffer size you are referring to but the control panel on my interface (Saffire Pro 40) shows ASIO buffer size of 2048

Hope this info’ helps – regards…

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[John]

OK,

can you just try to lower the Block / Buffer size to, say 512 and see if there’s a difference?

BR,
John

John Rammelt - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[Stephen Carter]

I lowered the Device/Process block size in studio One to 512 but it makes no difference! The cursor, visually, is still about a quarter of a bar past the drum hit position on the grid before that hit sounds. Any other suggestions to remedy this problem would be appreciated.

Regards…

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[Bob Federer]

I’m experiencing the same – sd3’s play cursor is about a dotted quarter ahead of the the audio – very frustrating – SD3 is the only plugin showing this. My system is fine, other plugins are fine – SD3 is playing back fine – it’s just the play cursor – I feel like it’d be great to have a dial to create visual offsets for SD3’s play cursor – problem would be solved. Make the visual offset window +- half a bar with very fine tuning. The phone must be ringing off the hook for this issue for you guys – Obviously I’m not the only one with this “feature”.
BTW, the playback cursor is fine if I use the stand alone version – any ideas?

My system: PC AMD running at 3400 quad core w/8 Gigs of RAM I’m using Reaper and ASIO config set to 128

[Stephen Carter]

Thanks Bob for confirming that this anomaly is not unique to my setup – at least I’m not going doo-lally!

Your observations, on this thread and your other post, are virtually identical to mine but on a different DAW, which would seem to suggest that this is an SD3 gremlin. I feel confident that the Toontrack people are looking into this and will, in due course (hopefully sooner rather than later), provide the necessary fix.

Regards….

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[Henrik Ekblom]

I’ll ask the coders to run some tests in the mentioned DAWs. We’ll get back to you with the progress, or if we have additional questions regarding this matter. Thanks for the feedback!

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[Stefan Branberg]

You could try to record arm the track that S3 is on, that worked for me (in Reaper). It also increases the responsiveness of the GUI as described in this thread (about EZD2 but it’s the same phenomenon) : https://www.toontrack.com/forum/requests-and-feedback/ez-drum-2-tap-to-find-lag-in-reaper/

Stefan Bränberg - Toontrack
Coder

[Henrik Ekblom]

Note that this latency is affecting all plugins – so it’s recommended to record arm any track that you want to control an instrument/effect plugin on.
Besides Reaper, both Studio One and Logic has the same system – the track has high latency as long as the track isn’t record armed.

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[Stephen Carter]

Thanks for trying to help…

I’ve run SD3 in a couple of projects with ‘Record Arm’ both engaged and not engaged and it makes no visual delay difference at all and neither does it make any difference to the reported latency for the project nor the SD3 plugin’s track latency. One project was less intensive (CPU/Plugins wise) than the other with registered latency reported to be less by about a factor of 4.5:1in Studio One. Both projects exhibited a visual delay compared to the audio and unsurprisingly the song with the greater latency had a greater audio/visual disparity.

The visual delay is noticeable both in the ‘Drums’ and ‘Grid’ view, however, as previously reported, the audio is in sync with the remaining tracks. Obviously (or seemingly so), Studio One is compensating for the audio latency but not the visual latency in the SD3 plugin. This begs the question; which software, if either, should be responsible for the synchronisation of the visual/audio output from the DAW?

I’m both frustrated and intrigued by this problem and look forwards to further input and possible solutions.

Regards…. Steve

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[Stephen Carter]

Anyone – anything?

This issue is not resolved, has it been confirmed as a visual latency bug and is it being looked into?

Some further feedback would be appreciated … Regards

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[Henrik Ekblom]

Well, it’s not as simple as calling it a ‘bug’, because we can only handle things based on the information that the DAW gives us when our products are used as plugins. We will look into this matter! As usual can’t Toontrack give any time estimates, or if it even can be fixed! But we’ll try 🙂

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[Stephen Carter]

Thanks very much – just needed confirmation that it is being looked into. Good luck, I look forward to a possible resolution.

Regards….

Windows 10 Pro/i7 6800k @3.4Ghz/16Gb ram. Studio One Pro, Melodyne Editor 4, Vocalign Project, Superior Drummer 3, Izotope N2-O8 and various other plugins. Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport, Focal Alpha 50's, Korg Pa3x, Korg Pad Kontrol, numerous guitars, basses & other antiquated outboard gear.

[Author]

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