Question

Hello,

Can someone, in Presonus, tell me which is the shortest MIDI quantization in Studio One, in other words, what is the real MIDI quantization when no quantization is applied; I didn't find  this information anywhere.

For example, in Logic, the shortest quantization is 3840 ticks in a bar, is it the same in Studio One ?

Thank's in advance for your answer.

Answer 1

I suspect with the "3840 ticks" you refer to pulses per quarter note (PPQN) and not quantize. Those are two different things. PPQN is especially important for input without quantize. AFAIK Studio One's PPQN is virtually unlimited, to a point it doesn't matter anymore (even for slow music).

That being said. When you talk about quantization, I did test out the maximum quantization resolution a while a go. I stopped at a quantize value of 1/1024, after that it became unreliable.

For the record, when you disable snap, Studio One will not use the PPQ, but absolute steps of a millisecond per step/tick.

Answer 2

Hi Niles,

Thank's for your answer.

In fact, pulses per quarter note is the shortest quantize that can be applied to a MIDI sequence, when snap is disabled; so it's not so different.

This is this value that I wanted to know, We can say that it's the internal resolution of the MIDI clock. As far as I could see, it's not noticed in the documentation.

So, I don't understand your answer when you say that "Studio One doen'st use PPQ, but absolute steps of a millisecond per tick".

A MIDI sequencer needs a reference clock to "stall" the notes all along the time, no ?

It was just by curiosity, just to know the precision of the MIDI "Real time" recording in Studio one, compared to others sequencers like Logic.

Best regards

Answer 3

@ cyrilsimon answer I mean, when disabling snap and moving the note with CTRL+Arrows it moves by 1 ms per nudge always, not a pulse or tick. So at 60 BPM the steps relative to the grid are smaller than at 240 BPM. Still you are able to place the note anywhere within that ms.

When recording the same fine resolution is applied. So when you play something without input quantize, PPQN simply isn't applicable because Studio One will place a note exactly where you played it (within the limit of the MIDI input device, which is usually between 1 and 3 ms). 

To illustrate the high resolution I've created an image where you can see I freely place a MIDI note within a millisecond. We're going to microseconds here.

When you study the XML data Studio One stores for MIDI performances you will notice how extremely fine the resolution is.

For instance 5 notes starting with a very small offset from each other will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<MusicPerformance timeFormat="2">
    <NoteEvent pitch="60" length="0.0014989741186230143" velocity="1" quantize.start="0.0055257542313178528"/>
    <NoteEvent start="4.4999999999999976e-006" pitch="61" length="0.0014989741186230143" velocity="1" quantize.start="0.0055257542313178528"/>
    <NoteEvent start="1.0499999999999996e-005" pitch="62" length="0.0014989741186230143" velocity="1" quantize.start="0.0055257542313178528"/>
    <NoteEvent start="1.4999999999999999e-005" pitch="63" length="0.0014989741186230143" velocity="1" quantize.start="0.0055257542313178528"/>
    <NoteEvent start="2.0999999999999999e-005" pitch="64" length="0.0014989741186230143" velocity="1" quantize.start="0.0055257542313178528"/>
</MusicPerformance>

The notes: