m00dawg
Offline
Texas

Has anyone else noticed a bit of a MIDI sync delay with ArduinoBoy and/or LSDJ (not sure which one), especially at lower BPMs? Working on a song at 100bpm and had to put in about -16ms pre-delay in Ableton Live on the MIDI interface hooked to the GB. The other synths don't seem to have an issue. Not a big deal, was more so wanting to make sure it wasn't something with my config.

If there is a delay, anyone have any suggestions on the ms to put in to compensate? I just picked -16ms by random guess and ear for that one song.

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

16 ms sounds much like the length of one LCD refresh frame. (1/60 s) Not sure if this is related. If it gets worse at lower BPMs, this may have to do with a feature in LSDj. In slave mode, the first byte that is received by LSDj is interpreted as the playback start position, which is used when a Gameboy is master on the other side. So when instead using an Arduinoboy, the first byte is just eaten by LSDj, and playback starts at the next received byte. You should instead use MIDI mode.

If this doesn't help, try using the Arduinoboy in MIDI mode with mGB, or why not my simple ROM, and see if you get the same latency problem in MIDI mode.

http://blog.gg8.se/wordpress/2013/01/20 … -midi-rom/

m00dawg
Offline
Texas

Oh, heh, derp - I actually didn't think there was a significant difference between SLAVE and MIDI. I actually thought MIDI was for outputting note-data FROM LSDJ? Just did a quick test between SLAVE and MIDI and, yeah, the sync actually seems much improved but I'll have to test again tomorrow. Was packing it in for the evening and turned my other synths off so just had the metronome to test.

Seems to make some sense since I always did feel the GB was more on beat when the BPM was faster - it's only our slow songs that I seem to complain. Would be lovely if it's as simple a fix as to setup MIDI mode tongue

Thanks for the insight!

Downstate
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shanghai

Slightly un-related, but one thing i noticed once when doing my midi-syncing was the midi cable.
Until i went to pick up a new midi cable and i noticed they had some Roland leads specifically for midi sync. Well thats what it says on the pack anyhow.
So turns out the default 5 quid midi lead i had was just poo-ey. I didnt know that before, so it might help some people.
Also - I have a slight off with my lsdj sync too on ableton. I always ran in slave mode syncing ableton and lsdj. I'll go home an try it on midi.

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

Downstate, that's something different. It probably just means the cable has all 5 pins connected. This makes the cable work with so called DIN sync which is an entirely different standard which is also using the same connector. Common on Roland gear like the Tx-x0x gear. Your cable was probably pooey for a different reason, like cold or broken solder joints or bad shielding or whatever.

Also, seems like I'm right in the middle of making software work better by using it correctly. Yay!

m00dawg
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Texas

By the way, we had band practice today and used MIDI mode for all the songs. No discernible problems whatsoever with sync on both fast and slow songs, so looks like that did it! Thanks again for the help!

Downstate
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shanghai

mine is still fucked. i gave up. any one want to buy my arduinoboy ? lol

m00dawg
Offline
Texas
Downstate wrote:

mine is still fucked. i gave up. any one want to buy my arduinoboy ? lol

Did you put it together yourself? If so, you may want to check things like solder joints along various paths (like MIDI and GB Link if not the whole board). A bad solder joint won't always just be a full short, but could be a noisy connection and could be what is causing the sync issues perhaps?

If you want to simplify things a bit, you can always route a board and get it printed (if you're wiring everything to a protoboard or something). I've got two different designs here and here. The latter is more for all-in-one rackmount so it's not especially simple, but it is small and works great.