Problems with delay per articulation feature.

[Nigel Simmons]

I've experimented with this negative delay per articulation feature, and I cannot get it to work right. I'm trying to add negative delay in articulation maps for Cinematic Studio Strings that I've successfully worked with in the past.

1. The velocity of notes are incorrectly playing very quietly (even if velocity is at 127) during the first few notes of a phrase within a new articulation.

2. When a phrase is played within an articulation, the last note of the phrase isn't played.

3. New articulations aren't being triggered, or will trigger well beyond when they're supposed to.

Anyone else try to use this feature? Have you used it with any success?

Edited Saturday at 08:58 AM by Nigel Simmons

[reginaldStjohn]

Just some suggestions. I have not used the negative delay feature but I have used articulations. Make sure you don't have any Continuous Controller (Expression) lanes that would make the velocity sound low. 

Maybe check the reference guide for suggestions.

[Nigel Simmons]

I've tried everything. I'm guessing the feature is just buggy. I've tried to check the documentation and images are not displaying, neither on my computer nor on my phone. It's all very maddening.

[Promidi]

I tried a simple piano phrase and a staccato string phase on a second track with an articulation with a -300ms delay  on each track here and this played fine.

All notes on both track played with their correct respective velocities and controllers ( I used CC10 on the string track to alternate the string panning as part of the test)

Synths used Arturia Piano V3 and 8DIO Strings anthology. 

The articulation map started before any MIDI events in their respective tracks and the  articulation map durations were for their entire respective phrases.

This is with the latest Sonar 2025.7 build 63

[Amberwolf]

4 hours ago, Nigel Simmons said:

 I've tried to check the documentation and images are not displaying, neither on my computer nor on my phone. It's all very maddening.

If that's on the legacy.cakewalk.com site, you'll need to force your browser to view the pages as http, not https.  Don't know why that works, but it does.

[Nigel Simmons]

6 hours ago, Promidi said:

I tried a simple piano phrase and a staccato string phase on a second track with an articulation with a -300ms delay  on each track here and this played fine.
 

I guess the problem lies in switching between articulations with negative delays within the same track. Maybe it's just not possible.

5 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

If that's on the legacy.cakewalk.com site, you'll need to force your browser to view the pages as http, not https.  Don't know why that works, but it does.

Thanks, I did not know this.

[Promidi]

29 minutes ago, Nigel Simmons said:

I guess the problem lies in switching between articulations with negative delays within the same track. Maybe it's just not possible.

I can’t see that would not be possible...........   

[David Baay]

11 hours ago, Nigel Simmons said:

I guess the problem lies in switching between articulations with negative delays within the same track. Maybe it's just not possible.

What's the exact scenario (i.e. what delay values, what tempo, where does the switch occur, and where are notes relative to the articulation start/end points). Maybe share a simple demo project.

I once had a project that exhibited a change in note volume related to an issue with articulation delays, but I reported it, and the problemis no longer reproducible in in the current release. Possibly you've encountered another manifestation of that problem.

[msmcleod]

@Nigel Simmons - One thing that could be the problems is your MIDI prepare buffer size.  If this is less than the negative delay, this could be the problem - e.g. a MIDI Prepare Buffer of 50ms, and a negative delay of 100ms will almost certainly result in the articulations not being sent out.

Try setting your prepare buffer to at least 25ms to 50ms larger than your largest negative delay - i.e. a negative delay of 100ms should have a MIDI prepare buffer of somewhere between 125ms and 150ms.  Note that this requirement only affects negative delays, not positive delays.

Also note that an excessively large MIDI prepare buffer will add a noticeable delay to the project starting after pressing play (i.e. setting it to 1000ms, which is a second, will add an extra second to the delay between pressing play and your project starting).

The MIDI prepare buffer is set ion Preferences->MIDI->Playback and Recording:

If this doesn't solve your problem, please send your problem project to @Jonathan Sasor.  Issues with negatively delayed articulations are incredibly difficult to reproduce, and even once we reproduce it can take hours of debugging to determine the root cause - so please try to delete as many tracks as you can to keep the project as simple as possible, whilst still reproducing the problem.

If you could also let us know what your MIDI prepare buffer size is, this will help to reproduce our end.

 

[Promidi]

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

One thing that could be the problems is your MIDI prepare buffer size.  If this is less than the negative delay, this could be the problem - e.g. a MIDI Prepare Buffer of 50ms, and a negative delay of 100ms will almost certainly result in the articulations not being sent out.

With my test, my MIDI prepare buffer size is 50ms and I used a negative delay of -300ms and the articulation map still produced the required result.

Also, please correct me if I am wrong on this one, but can MIDI prepare buffer size not be dynamic depending on the MIDI data stream?

See:

https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002369593-What-s-the-difference-between-Cakewalk-Sonar-and-Cakewalk-by-BandLab