Syncing the MPC with Cubase

Hi all.

I have a rather nasty little problem with my production environment at the moment. I use the MPC4000 for pretty much all my basic drum programming, sampling etc needs and do the rest of my projects (traditional recording, like gtr, vox etc) on Cubase SX2.

My problem is with sync. I would really love to use the MPC as a slave to Cubase so that I could program beats and work on the Cubase-stuff at the same time, BUT I'm unable to sync the two properly.

Using Midi Clock I can make them (Cubase as master, MPC as slave) play in "sync" but with with a clearly audible latency problem. Granted, my audio interface is responsible for 6 ms worth of latency, but this should not be such a big problem as I can even perform precision tasks like playing bass with that latency, but the latency is serious enough to notice the beats to be seriously off- and lazy-sounding. Also, Cubase compensates for the audio interface-latency after recording, but still if I zoom in on the MPC-produced tracks after recording, they're visibly late from the beat grid on Cubase.

What I do now is that I work separately on my MPC and then just occasionally transfer all the shit to Cubase and manually nudge them into sync after recording. This is obviously not very creative and takes a lot of excess time, not to mention sanity!

Any advice and pointers are very welcome to help my situation. Is there some setting I've overlooked? Does somebody have this same setting working? Would moving from Midi Clock to SMPTE help? Are there differences between MIDI-interfaces? I use a rather cheap 1-in 1-out USB-MIDI-interface at the moment.

Thank you!

Tommi

http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=34444

My friend had a latency issue because of lack of ram.

threshed wrote:http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=34444

Thanks, but the only solution I see here is for the fact that midi sync takes a bit of time to hook up and as I've worked with stuff like serial chained ADAT's in the past, I'm already hysterical enough about the time it takes to sync up that I'd never expect sync to hook up in a microsec so all my songs have two empty bars in the beginning. My problem is a consistent latency through the song.

My friend had a latency issue because of lack of ram.

Hmm. I doubt this as well as my PC has 768 MB DDR and my MPC has the full amount of 512 MB or RAM.

Thanks anyway!

Tommi

Try using logic - see if the latency problem persists

You'd have to use an earlier version of logic if you running on a PC as the newer versions are for Mac only

Peace

Swinsta wrote:Try using logic - see if the latency problem persists

Hmmm. I'd rather sell my MPC than switch from Cubase to Logic. The MPC is just a snazzy new toy and a useful tool for me, but Cubase is an extension of my arm, brain, heart and soul so I'd rather stick to it.

Thanks anyway!

Tommi

What version of cubase r u using?