I borrowed a Polybrute from a friend and noticed that when using Polybrute Connect, the output of the Polybrute jitters like crazy.
To test this, do the following:
1) Set BPM of your DAW to 60.0. In the Preferences, set the audio device's buffer size to 1024 or best maximum (will explain later why).
2) Load Polybrute Connect onto some MIDI Track
3) Create a MIDI Clip on that MIDI Track which plays a same MIDI Note every beat. Since the BPM is 60.0, this will be every second.
4) Select some very short percussive sound with fast attack on the Polybrute, without any FX etc.
5) Start playback and record the incoming audio of the Polybrute.
6) Load the recorded audio into a waveform editor and cut the audio so that the first recorded hit is exactly on 0 seconds
7) Now, for every second check how much the hit that should happen exactly on that second deviates from the real time.
All in all, if you did the test correctly, you'll notice that in 7) the hit will deviate as much as audio_buffer_size/sample_rate. So if your audio buffer size is 1024 samples @ 44100Hz sample rate, you'll get a jitter of about 23ms. The smaller the buffer size, the lower the jitter.
Now why does this happens?
This happens for a very simple reason: Polybrute Connect throws away the sample positions of the MIDI Notes and just sends all MIDI Notes ASAP to the hardware. This means that in the case of the buffer size being 1024, if there's a MIDI note with sample pos=0 and another MIDI Note with sample pos=1023, they both will be heard coming out of the audio output of the Polybrute at exactly the same time.
It's pretty obvious that this is either a design flaw, or that somebody in your engineering department just "forgot" to take into account the MIDI Note sample positions. In any case, it's not possible to get a jitter-free playback via Polybrute Connect. For granted, the jitter becomes less with lower buffer size, but even with 256 samples buffer size you still end up with 256/44100 = 5.8ms jitter! That's far too much!
EDIT: I've attached a WAV where you can see what I mean
EDIT2: I've repeated the same test (with buffer size 1024), but this time sending the notes via a MIDI cable. Good news: It's very accurate, up to +/- millisecond. I'm confident the Polybrute Connect problem is therefore solveable.
