I have a question about the new Harmonix plugin. My understanding is that it supports MIDI Clock and runs on the audio thread. Traditionally, MIDI Clock w/SPP has quarter-frame accuracy compared to LTC or VITC. If I were to use the Harmonix plugin to set up dynamic music systems, is Quartz still necessary? I realize that sample-accurate scheduling is way, way better than quarter-frame accuracy, but then again in ordinary music production, MIDI doesn’t have sample-accuracy in any time-base, and never has. Anyone have an opinion on this?
Harmonix seem not to use Quartz at all in either their plugin or Fortnite Festival/Patchwork, UE5-main contains new code that shows that Epic is integrating the Harmonix Music Clock into the sequencer, no quartz there either, It doesn’t seem like Epic/Harmonix consider Quartz to be a part of this new Harmonix-Midi based eco-system.
And really, I am not sure Quartz is functionally any more precise/accurate than the harmonix clock, the harmonix clock can work at the metasound block rate and tracks midi ticks, Quartz is limited to 1/32nd notes and yes you can ‘mess around with it’ to over sample but really I think we’re talking about minute differences here at BEST, Harmonix midi timing is consistent with itself and it can be used to generate triggers for gameplay/audio controls.
The only portion of Quartz that the new harmonix infrastructure doesn’t cover, which can be considered a rather large portion, is ‘how do you sync multiple audio components to one another’ and Harmonix gives no solution to that, a harmonix clock in a metasound doesn’t know anything about other harmonix clocks in other audio components (though it can be slaved to clocks within the same audio component instance) - so if you’re banking on having anything more complex than ‘just a single midi player controlled by its own transport’ you’re going to have to need to work with the Metasound Builder to do it which is what Harmonix do in Fortnite.
Really, the Harmonix plugin is a big new thing, it has tons of new functionality, a lot of it is primarily designed for Epic/Harmonix usage within Fortnite, it’s not a ‘ready made user facing solution’ like Quartz is.
MIDI 1.0 is 31.25 kilobaud, and has been generally “good enough” for music since the 80s, as long as you’re not doing a lot of daisy-chaining at the hardware level. I look forward to experimenting with Harmonix.