Certainly. A bit of background: I have had Migic installed for a year or two (I’m sure you have heard of it), and have tried using it on a few recording projects. Came to the conclusion that it is on the cusp of usability, but not quite. If it tracked just a bit faster and better it would be a useful tool.
It seems to be an orphan product now though (at least, they aren’t answering any emails), so in search of a better mousetrap I have installed trial versions of MG2 and MG3beta & I’m running some tests.
Gear info: test guitar is an Ibanez Roadstar, bridge humbucker pickup, tone and volume pots full up, recorded directly into the audio interface. DAW is Reaper, latest version 7.30.
I recorded an audio track of notes and chords which is used for all tests so the input data is consistent.
Then applied the various converters and routed the MIDI output in each case to a new track for recording.
Each plugin is as it comes ‘out of the box’: no adjustments at all.
So by expanding the horizontal scale to millisecond resolution I can compare the timing of the MIDI to the source audio. For latency testing I recorded single E notes in octaves from open bottom string up to 12th fret on top string. Of course there’s a degree of uncertainty here: from examining the audio waveform of the recorded guitar, it’s a bit of a judgement call to say exactly where the note ‘begins’.
Plus or minus a few milliseconds, I guess.
The results so far are… confusing. There is a LOT of variance.
I’m not sure what is going on yet. Either:
- I hit each of the notes at different levels of attack & that affects the conversion? Or,
- My entire methodology is flawed and Reaper doesn’t really display audio &/or MIDI timings to that degree of accuracy?
More tests to come. I may try a new recording with each note normalized to about the same level.
And of course, this is just technical testing so far (I admit it, I’m a systems software engineer in my day job)!
Can’t comment yet on subjective usability… I’ll probably create a test song over the next few days to experiment.
So all that said, here are some (confusing) measurements so far… two instances of each note:
Open Low E
Migic 24 24
MG2 poly 28 27
MG2 mono 22 21
Mg3 poly 22 29
Mg3 mono 25 27
Mid E (4th string 2nd fret)
Migic 19 13
MG2 poly 16 21
MG2 mono 16 11
Mg3 poly 22 21
Mg3 mono 19 21
Top E string
Migic 11 17
MG2 poly 17 12
MG2 mono 8 7
Mg3 poly 25 22
Mg3 mono 9 17
Top string 12th fret
Migic 30 9
MG2 poly 24 16
MG2 mono 19 11
Mg3 poly 24 22
Mg3 mono 27 22