Is negative note delay possible?
Is it possible to negatively delay incoming MIDI notes?
I can negatively delay incoming MIDI notes manually using Live's negative track delays, but I want to do it automatically.
FTR, Live's track delays do not appear to be addressable via the LOM, so that solution is out.
Thank you in advance.
You can't delay negatively in real time because that would mean playing into the future. You have to delay everything and then adjust the individual delay relative to the whole. In a DAW, this is possible with latency compensation. For example, a delay plug-in reports 1 second of latency to the DAW, the DAW delays everything by this amount and the individual delay then has the possibility to send up to 1000 ms before its colleagues.
You can't delay negatively in real time because that would mean playing into the future.
this is true, but only at the current time(in the future, we may discover ways to play further into the future(but only in that particular future)) 😜🤪🫨🫠
👽
Thanks for the replies. I well understand how PDC and lookahead works, and I am wondering if MFL offers some hooks to exploit that to do lookahead processing with MIDI and notes. My research so far has not turned up anything, hence this post.
I don't know exactly how it works. I only know of two plug-ins that can relatively pull individual signals forward, but I have no idea how they do it exactly and they are rather correction tools, not meant for direct musical and/or dynamic use. Voxengo Latency Delay and Eventide Precision Time Align. Have not tried them in Max yet.
"this is true, but only at the current time(in the future, we may discover ways to play further into the future(but only in that particular future))"
in the spaceship model i used to once come to this planet we had that.
it had a main monitor on the command bridge where you could look into the future for about 1 hour.
due to the crash landing and because it is invisible i have no longer access to this feature. (the crash landing and its invisibility are also the main reasons why i am still here)
"My research so far has not turned up anything"
i would not rely on vst protocol stuff or trust ableton live at all.
why dont you just introduce a fixed "latency" yourself using a custom device which replaces the transport controls of the host program, simply with GUI buttons which are delayed for 1000ms or a whole beat (and/or the MTC slave sync).
not delaying your incoming midi notes will then mean pre-delaying them.
(in hosts like cubase you would combine all midi and audio tracks into a "group track" and delay that group track globally. then the transport and everything "live" will be early.)
I understand exactly what you are talking about, but I think that solution might not be a good fit for reasons that are not worth elaborating on here. The situation I am working on is similar to this thread where OP needs his automation to land BEFORE his MIDI notes.
As I wrote in the OP, I can achieve the solution with track delays. I can break up my processing across tracks, delay the notes on one track, process them, and then negatively delay them on another track after the processing is done. That works fine, but it is not pretty. I can also get rid of one track, because I can use a simple MFL device to induce the forward delay. But, I still have to use a track delay to negatively delay my notes after processing, and that is what prompted me to make this post. I thought, “I am close to a solution. I just need a way to move my notes back after processing.”
I am also investigating some MFL quantize devices. Like, if I could do my solution above and stick some kind of quantize device at the end of the chain to move the notes back by the same number of milliseconds they were delayed at the beginning of the chain, then that would be perfect.
So yeah, the solution feels close. I just need a way to move the notes backwards.