Negative Track Delay......still an issue!

[GerOwens]

Does anyone know if there is a solution to the old negative track delay issue? Not being able to set track delay separately in ms for Multi Instruments and even Midi Multi's is a really huge issue for me in big template projects. I'm spending a huge amount of time setting region tick delays (which always vary according to tempo). It's the only issue in Logic that would make me move over to Cubase, and I'd really prefer to stay with Logic if at all possible.
Anyone have any ideas?

[polanoid]

4 hours ago, GerOwens said:

Not being able to set track delay separately in ms for Multi Instruments

I just tried that, works just fine here.

 

4 hours ago, GerOwens said:

and even Midi Multi's

I'm not sure what you mean by that

[GerOwens]

Thanks Polanoid,
Just for clarity, I'm trying to have different track delays (in ms) on Multi Instrument Aux tracks. My setup is a master and slave system running multiple VePro instances that house Kontakt multi's on the slave. On the master, I create a Software Instrument for VePro AU3, expand/create 16 aux's in mixer view for the instrument, then create a track for each aux. In the main window, I'm then trying to set a different negative delay for each aux track of the multi, but each one of the aux channels say 'inst' and only allows a delay of +/-99 ticks instead of ms, the delay setting can only be changed to ms in the Instrument Channel, not the aux's. So the only option for a delay in ms is to set one ms delay - which affects all aux's in that multi.
The alternative would be to create a 16 part multi timbral Instrument and use the resulting midi tracks as opposed to aux tracks (as they allow ms delay), however it's twice the track count and I use bounce in place as a safety, so I'd still need to offset the delay of the bounced audio track when prepping for the final mix. 

[polanoid]

OK in Logic speak, a Multi Instrument is an Environment object managing 16 external MIDI channels, so disregard what I wrote and thanks for the explanation. You're talking about Multi Out Aux channel strips (I guess?) which can of course not be negative-delayed individually as they only transport Audio signals.

What if you set a "large enough" negative delay on the Instrument track and insert a Sample Delay plug-in in each multi-out aux, set its "Unit" to "ms" and add a positive delay to adjust the individual aux delay (which would then be the (negative) instrument delay plus the (positive) aux delay)? 

[GerOwens]

Hi Polanoid. I tried your idea about using a large enough negative delay and then a Sample Delay plugin, but it didn't work for me. So after a LOT of experimenting and frustration, I went with using different VePro instance multi's according to the delay each group required (one for -60ms, one for -150ms and one for -333ms). That option combined with an amazing kontakt script by kpmuzik called 'Variable Delay Compensator' went a LONG way towards making the delay issue a lot more bearable. The script can be found by searching Vi-control.net
 

On 4/26/2024 at 7:58 AM, polanoid said:

OK in Logic speak, a Multi Instrument is an Environment object managing 16 external MIDI channels, so disregard what I wrote and thanks for the explanation. You're talking about Multi Out Aux channel strips (I guess?) which can of course not be negative-delayed individually as they only transport Audio signals.

What if you set a "large enough" negative delay on the Instrument track and insert a Sample Delay plug-in in each multi-out aux, set its "Unit" to "ms" and add a positive delay to adjust the individual aux delay (which would then be the (negative) instrument delay plus the (positive) aux delay)? 

 

[David Nahmani]

1 hour ago, GerOwens said:

I went with using different VePro instance multi's according to the delay each group required (one for -60ms, one for -150ms and one for -333ms). That option combined with an amazing kontakt script by kpmuzik called 'Variable Delay Compensator' went a LONG way towards making the delay issue a lot more bearable.

Thank you for letting us know what worked for you to resolve this issue, I'm sure it'll help others looking to deal with the same challenges. 🙂 Using different instances of the plug-in for each delay value makes sense indeed. 

[GerOwens]

No problem David, hopefully it'll help. It really would be great if Logic had an option on instrument aux tracks that would allow for negative delay - maybe someday 🙂

[David Nahmani]

Yes but from the ground up Logic, was always optimized for single instruments, and the use of multi-timbral software instruments in Logic was always frowned upon by the people who designed Logic, as that isn't how the DAW was meant to be used and certainly not the optimum way to handle your Mac's resources. 

That is, I believe, why the whole handling of multi-timbral instrument plug-ins in Logic Pro has always been finicky and never really been improved upon, because we're encourage to use one instrument for each timbre instead. 

Unfortunately that's not how many of those 3rd party instrument library were designed, so as the users, we're left to try to find some kind of clunky workaround, which apparently you've found. At least IMO your workaround makes sense. 

[Harriet]

I have just discovered this illuminating discussion on VI-control: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/logic-scripter—multiport-track-delay-compensation.97100/

Note that some of the earlier posts are overtaken by later ones - mostly reporting yet more bugs in the way multitimbral instruments work.