where the note thinks you played it
the gap between when you press a key and when the machine decides you did.
logged
you press a key. somewhere between your finger and the place the note gets written down, there is a hallway. the keypress crosses a window, hops between processes, waits in a queue behind whatever the screen happens to be drawing. by the time the note is stamped it is six to thirty milliseconds late, and worse, it is late by a different amount each time.
six to thirty milliseconds is small. it is also the whole difference between a groove and a mess. you play something that felt right and the machine writes down something that feels almost right, which is its own kind of wrong, because you can hear it but you can’t point at it.
the fix is to stop stamping the note where it arrives and start stamping it where it was meant. the note now carries the time of its own keydown, and the engine back-dates it to that moment. record where the thing is owned, not where it’s convenient.
there was a quieter failure underneath this one. a chord held across the loop’s seam — you start it on one pass, you’re still holding it when the loop wraps — used to vanish the instant you stopped recording. the note didn’t know which pass it belonged to, so it belonged to none. now it remembers which time around it began.
both of these are the same bug wearing two coats. the machine kept its own clock and trusted it over yours. it doesn’t anymore.
— frank