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Is the timing of VST Instruments as accurate as that of hardware MIDI synths?

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Is the timing of VST Instruments as accurate as that of hardware MIDI synths?

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When you’re playing them in real time the timing accuracy is largely determined by your soundcard drivers, and as long as you have low-latency ones your timing should be as tight as that on most hardware MIDI synths. However, timing can also suffer from jitter (see last month’s PC Musician feature for more details), and this is dependent on the host application. The result can be a variation in beat placement of as much as twice the normal latency value — although MIDI + Audio sequencer developers do now seem to be aware of the problem and are committed to solving it in future updates. However, once recorded into your sequencer, MIDI events are passed to VST Instruments with sample-accurate time-stamps, so there can be no loss of timing resolution between the host and instrument. This means that anyone who subsequently quantises their MIDI tracks or enters them in step time should have sample-accurate timing. This is far better than hardware MIDI synths, that have a gap of about one m

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