I’m wondering if improving the internal clock is somewhere on the list of recommendations.
I love to use the Mod for audio looping, but in this case it always needs to be the midi master due to how sloshy midi sync is. An audio loop is usually seamless, if its loop length is determined by the internal clock. Incoming midi always has the 4ms give and take inherent in midi and can make for clicky loops.
For some drum machines/samplers, I play them into Logic without syncing, and their notion of 80bpm is so close to what Logic calculates, that the loops I trim are way better than if I sync that gear to Logic using midi. It seems unintuitive, but a drum machine following its own internal clock is more consistent beat to beat, even if it’s slightly off in terms of bar length. The tempo drift, only becomes evident if you play minutes of audio into Logic. But for a 4 bar loop - not syncing gives me a more consistent loop.
However if I submit the Mod Duo to this test, its notion of 80bpm is not even close to what Logic believes is 80bpm. So this method of capturing loops from what I do in the Mod is not doable. It’s audibly inconsistent.
I wish the internal clock of the Mod was more consistent with other gear - not to say that any of that gear is exactly correct in their BPM calculation, but many of them are in the ballpark of what Logic calculates, and that says to me there is some internal standard used to calculate BPM.
Here is an example of where some clock related issue has gone wrong.
Using the MDA dub delay, if you set the delay to 6000ms, that would be exactly 2 bars of 80bpm.
However record this into your Daw and you will see that 6000ms comes out to exactly 2/3 of what it should be, that is a huge discrepancy. I’m not sure if this is specific to MDA Dub Delay, but it’s clearly related to some internal calculation gone wrong.
It shouldn’t matter what BPM your pedalboard is set to - 6000ms should be 6000ms every time.
And just to explain the great value of the MDA dub delay. There is no (affordable) hardware delay on the market which gives you 6 seconds of delay which is also adjustable by single milliseconds.
This is important if you want to sync to other gear. No drum machine or sequencer is exact in its BPM, and this gets less exact when you sync via midi. But drum machines do tend to be consistent, so if you know one is 3ms off in their calculation of 80 BPM, then you can have a loop in your Dub Delay plug in which is 5994 ms and it will sync to that version of 80 BPM very tightly.
But this only works if your Dub Delay plug in calculates ms correctly. Even if that is slightly off, you can find a ms increment which works through some trial and error recording loops in your Daw to determine where you need to adjust.
Just out of curiosity, what is the significance of the maximum delay time being 7341ms?
I would think 8 seconds would be a good round number?
That’s four bars of 120 bpm techno right there
One other observation about the internal clock.
In the software editor, the BPM can be set to two decimals.
In the hardware, this won’t be seen, the hardware options do not give you any decimals.
In practice I have seen only strange results by setting the BPM to some amount with decimals. As in slowing the bpm by .20 doesn’t always slow it, or speeding it up by .30 may or may not do that.
Is the hardware ignoring any decimal points in BPM, but some plug-ins use it and therefore the results are unpredictable?
I believe that this is only a constrain of the characters space on the screen of the DuoX. In fact the WebGUI should be more accurate and have the right value.
I would say a bit. The 1.11 is in the RC1 and we already understood that a RC2 is needed. That is cooking, so I would say according to @falkTX previous feedback it’s still a little bit too soon.
