MIDI CLOCK JITTER // ABERRATION FROM DEFAULT VALUE

Published on Oct 13, 2017 LESINDES

"Here we test 15 hardware units - AKAI MPC LIVE amoung those - and how exact they are transmitting MIDI clock to the very sensitive ELEKTRON MACHINEDRUM at 120 bpm. And the overall stunning result is: The older the tighter! In the end the ashaming results of 2 representative professional DAWs: CUBASE 9.5 and PROTOOLS 12.5 on WIN 10.
The master tempos of two machines (MFB URZWERG, ARTURIA KEYSTEP) deviate a little from our 120 reference tempo because both machines have no own bpm counter.

MIDI is often blamed for being to slow to be really precise in terms of timing. And this also correct notes (to a certain exetent). But triggering of notes are not the main task of DAWs anymore. With a proper MIDI interface DAWs are quite in time. The problem is the MIDI clock since it is not generated by the DAW itself but by the hosting OS and this OS is giving a sh*t on our time requirements handling it with a very low priority. There hardware solutions to avoid the unreliable DAW/OS clock generating it from an audio signal."