Midi playback is slightly early

[E-money]

I'm having some issues where the midi notes seem to playback a hair earlier than when I feel like I recorded them.

The midi playback seems a hair early.  I think I had to mess with this in Sonar X2 once upon a time, but can't remember how for the life of me.

Any tips for tightening midi recording/playback would be greatly appreciated!

[David Baay]

What's the timing reference and routing of MIDI and audio?  Are you saying the sound from an external  hardware synth is sounding ahead of the Cakewalk's audio metronome when enabled on playback with the synth output monitored through Cakewalk? And is the MIDI quantized to the grid in Cakewalk? If you're direct-monitoring the synth and your audio buffer is high, you might conceivably hear the synth a bit ahead of Cakewalk's audio metronome and/or audio tracks playing back, but usually MIDI transmission and synth response delays would mostly cancel out any output latency, and the typical 2-3ms discrepancies would be pretty hard to hear in any case.

Cakewalk has a Timing Offset setting to sync MIDI-driven hardware synths with audio, but usually it's used to do the opposite - delay audio to sync with the delayed synth response. In any case, you'll want to understand exactly where the sync error is being introduced before you go tweaking anything. Timing Offset can have undesirable effects in other contexts, so I'd start be making sure it's 0ms.

Preferences > Audio > Sync and Caching > Timing Offset (msec)

If we're talking about soft synths the above is all irrelevant.

Edited March 28, 2022 by David Baay

[E-money]

15 hours ago, David Baay said:

What's the timing reference and routing of MIDI and audio?  Are you saying the sound from an external  hardware synth is sounding ahead of the Cakewalk's audio metronome when enabled on playback with the synth output monitored through Cakewalk? And is the MIDI quantized to the grid in Cakewalk? If you're direct-monitoring the synth and your audio buffer is high, you might conceivably hear the synth a bit ahead of Cakewalk's audio metronome and/or audio tracks playing back, but usually MIDI transmission and synth response delays would mostly cancel out any output latency, and the typical 2-3ms discrepancies would be pretty hard to hear in any case.

Cakewalk has a Timing Offset setting to sync MIDI-driven hardware synths with audio, but usually it's used to do the opposite - delay audio to sync with the delayed synth response. In any case, you'll want to understand exactly where the sync error is being introduced before you go tweaking anything. Timing Offset can have undesirable effects in other contexts, so I'd start be making sure it's 0ms.

Preferences > Audio > Sync and Caching > Timing Offset (msec)

If we're talking about soft synths the above is all irrelevant.

Thanks, it was an offset setting that must have carried over from Sonar.