hollyhock ii, midi latency/jitter and expert sleepers

[Fayette]

hello!

I bought hollyhock ii last week and so far i'm impressed! very nice program with a huge potential.

my plan is to try and use hollyhock as a modular midi sequencer for my hardware synths but so far I havent been able to get it to work properly. i'm sending midi, but its not tight at all. when I seqeunce stuff internally with vst plugins its tight, but as soon as I send my sequences out of usine there's latency and a lot of jitter.

anybody else experiencing this? and is there a workaround?

some of my hardware synths cant even handle the data send from hollyhock, I tried connecting the same midi sequence (150 bpm, random 16th notes) between my nord modular G1 and my virus ti2 with very different results. The G1 responded to the midi data, but there was very obvious latency and jitter. When trying to send the same midi data to the virus it only made noise, as if it was receiving some kind of corrupted midi data.

now I realize that part of this problem I'm having might be due to me not knowing hollyhock good enough yet, but i've read both the hollyhock manual and everything I could find about midi, latency, jitter and hardware on the forum.

I thought about using expert sleepers with hollyhock, if i'm correct I should be able to get sample accurate timing from hollyhock with modules from expert sleepers, but i'm not sure since I havent been able to find anybody who uses such a setup. not sure how I would implement it yet, but I'm very curious and I will try and see if I can find a solution.


I'm on 2014 macbook pro and for the small test I did, I used a rme ucx card for both sound and midi.

thanks in advance to anybody taking the time to help me with this, I would LOVE to be able to use hollyhock as I first intended, would be so much fun.

best,
Emil

[Question]

Hi

Is this occuring even with very simple workspace, ie., hardware -> Usine (just with a MIDI in and out) -> hardware ?

Also, as you might know already, there's this "perfest syncro" option. I'm not even sure if this has an effect on MIDI timing, but may worth a try anyway : )

Q

[Fayette]

right now i'm running some very basic setups only to find out how tight hollyhock is. I'm getting some very weird results which makes me wanna test this properly and make sure its not just me being a n00b... which it might very well be

oh and the perfect synchro button is on!

[nay-seven]

Welcome fayette,
depending of the patch you use to send Midi, try also to add Midi make monophonic script( modules /midi/midi tools)
at the end of your Midi chain ( before the Midi out module)
Some synth need note off messages and this script will create them.

you can also try to reduce the Usine bloc size in the setup/audio tab

[Fayette]

thank you. been enoying hollyhock so far, so many interesting possibilities, quite overwhelming, but in a good way!

so far nothing helps, the clock still drifts and is jittery... once I have time i'll do some more serious measuring to see whats up!

[secretkillerofnames]

I've just now tried with a Nord Modular G1 and a Microbrute.
Both seem to have the same latency and it is quite noticeable.
I've noticed that it is not so bad direct monitoring through my Focusrite Sapphire but it's still there.
Can I ask - what is the best way to setup MIDI for external hardware?
Because I wonder if part of my problem is the signal flow.
I am taking MIDI input which has to go through a patch (simple MIDI IN / MIDI OUT modules) then through MIDI OUT to the Synth and back in on another rack through Audio Input and Audio Thru patch.
There is no latency compensation for external synths I imagine?
How do I use the "trace midi latency" feature in "expert"?

[sephult]

Hi everyone,

Regarding usage of sending, and sending externally...could you upload a patch fayette?
One problem faced when using MIDI when first starting Hollyhock is the possibility of sending messages too quickly.
If you are scaling the floating point data to midi range 0-127 then using that to base your CreateMidi Send signals...check to see if you truncated or rounded that value before using a has change to send the message. If you use floating point values in this case you will be triggering the midi for every instance of five significant digits. You can definitely overload the output in this case.

Reason I am thinking this might be the case of overload is that your Nord seems to respond, but you said your ti2 does not as sounds odd?
Well possibly the Nord2 controller chip is just rejecting these messages, where the ti2 is freaking out

Nay is also right about the Note-Off, first using Hollyhock...if you are not careful...you will realize the hard way that note-off messages in some modules are not there. They are generators and note-offs have to be created. Pop a MIDI Transformer in-line and modify the Length for a fixed length Note-off and start doing some test latency timings if this seems to be the case.

Regardless, I am getting ready to setup my systems again to do some sync and external timing test as well, possibly within the next few days...I am awaiting my Scarlett for a second system, so I could possibly help both of you.

-S

[sephult]

Trace MIDI

"Traces the real MIDI in latency, in other words, the time elapsed between the MIDI message arrives to the computer and it is handled by Usine."

[secretkillerofnames]

Trace MIDI

"Traces the real MIDI in latency, in other words, the time elapsed between the MIDI message arrives to the computer and it is handled by Usine."

OK I was wondering how we get to see the values - guessing it goes to the LOG file?

I don't think it will help me - external hardware always needs experimenting with buffer and block sizes
I could also find a more streamlined signal flow.

With the Nord Modular and Live 9 I usually set a Hardware Latency of around 10ms and i'm OK.

I had Numerology running the Nord, Microbrute, Novation Nova and Casio CZ101 all at once with minimal latency and jitter.

I'm presuming it will only be a problem when running multiple synths and on board synth plugins.