[LAD] High-res PPQn

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Mon Dec 21 16:24:01 UTC 2009


On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Niklas Klügel <niklas.kluegel at mytum.de> wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I recently wrote a sequencer for multi-touch/collaborative music
> composition as part of my thesis. I currently set the PPQ to 128 which

"PPQN" (an inadequately defined term if ever there was one) should be
a number with a very large number of factors. Several DAWs, including
Ardour, use 1920, some use 3840. The idea is that you want to be able
to express as many possible subdivisions of "a quarter note" (whatever
that actually means, since its not always "a quarter note") as a whole
integral value. This avoids rounding error. 1920 is a pretty good
choice; 3840 is arguably even better.

To be more precise, you want to be able to express, at the absolute minimum:

    1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 1/6 1/8 1/16 1/32 1/64 1/128

divisions of a note as an integer.

it has absolutely nothing to do with clock/timer resolution and
certainly is not related to choices like 32 bit/64 bit etc.



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