Fung45 wrote:Phase is for some reason one of the hardest things for people to wrap their head around when you first learn it. I still don't quite understand jitter fully. Otobot does jitter refer to the 1/44100th of a second samples can be off when not using a sync like wordclock?
Wordclock and jitter would be another case where digital synchronization is concerned. When a clock (quarz that swings or another pulse source) to which audio is sync'ed isn't exact enough to keep for example 44100 Hz (if that's the set sample rate) and gets 'out of sync' every now and then which causes (sometimes unnoticable) dropouts.
Physical MIDI has jitter too. I think that jitter is the cause for the existence of this thread. It's exactly why the phasing or comb filtering we notice when layering in the MPC keeps comming and going, alternating, being unpredictable.
The jitter I meant regarding the "sample-accurate" MIDI of DAWs isn't really jitter but a fixed rounding error caused by the fact that the sequencer has a fixed resolution of for example 960 PPQN (pulse per quarter note) which is not as fine as the sample rate.
One quarter note at 90 BPM = 60s/90BPM = 2/3 seconds long.
2/3 s / 960 PPQN = 0.69444... ms -> 1 pulse (or tick) is 0.69444... milliseconds long.
1 Sample @ 44100 Hz = 0.022676 ms ( <- that's a finer resolution)
-> 1 PPQN @ 90BPM @ 44100 Hz sampling rate = 30.625 samples long.
-> The finest resolution of the internal MIDI sequencer is 30.625 times bigger than the finest resolution of the sample rate
or in other words 1 tick in the sequencer is 30.625 samples long @ tempo 90 BPM.
Since there are only whole samples the 2nd tick would be at sample 31 not 30.625. The next 16th note however would be at sample 7350 (30.625 * 960 / 4) which is a whole figure... so the 16th note would come out exactly at the right time on a whole sample pass... I hope I could explain that well.
But this is really not a problem for the sequencer since it is still "sample accurate" each pass because there is no real jitter that causes the note to come out on a sample later or earlier the next pass since it is rounded correctly each time.
nogginj wrote:Yes Fung, jitter is when the two sources clocks don't line up correctly so you're not getting a 1-1 transfer of samples.
And thanks again to Otobot for helping clear up the misinformation.
Anything can be 'sample accurate' so as long as you describe it in terms of samples from some source....usually an audio stream.
For the record, 'samples' is not a distinctly audio term.
No problem

You're right about the term sample. I think the confusion started because we talked about sample accuracy in regards to sample rate in the context of hardware samplers that deal with "samples" or as we should call them "sound snippets" or something along those lines
