Comment by Aldipower
2 months ago
This does not solve the underlying problem at all, which makes today's MIDI, coming from a normal computer, almost unusable for serious sequencing. This is timing and jitter issues! So, may I asked, what is the actual use-case for this sequencer? I would like to see/hear some music you made with it. Or is this just for the sake of using AI?
PipeWire with rtkit works incredibly stably with wildly short buffer lengths (low latency). Given the short buffer size, there's not much chance for big timing issues to arise (unless there's underruns with dead air, which doesn't seem to be the case).
This was a surprising assertion to hear. Maybe on some OS, doing reliable timing is a problem. But with modern audio pipelines, things feel like they are in an extremely good state.
Actually I am using PipeWire with rtkit on Debian. But somehow it does not solve my midi problems. "Audio pipeline" is not "midi". Nevertheless I am doing all my _audio_ (not midi) work on Debian and I am very happy with it.
If you have hardware synths you are going to have a decent midi and audio interface that this is not a problem. It wasn't even a problem 25 years ago. There is no reason for consumer grade audio to be able to do this because most people will never use it.
I have maybe 20 hardware synths and I do a lot of sequencing. And yes it wasn't a problem 25 years ago, that is exactly why I still use an Atari STe! :-) But today it is a problem. It is just not possible to do complex and tight sequencing today with a normal Win, Mac or Linux computer. Even with my RME PCIe card. Your argument, "it wasn't a problem decades ago, so it cannot today either" is simply not correct.
Midi from a browser suffers from slowdownw due to have javascript is just too slow, non-threaded. There afde ways around it, but those are all workarounds.
Just move put of focus, and you will see how it handles sending clock. I went to a hardware based, external clock signal, and using spp to force syncs between my tools, and use rtmidi+c
From what I understand, midi messages can have timestamps into the future, but that implies buffering on the receiver end. Do most MIDI instruments not support enough buffering to overcome lag? Because in sequencing, the future is pretty-well known.
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These opinions are not helpful.