I've tested in both Studio One and Reaper and it's the same.

I have an Alesis Q49 USB keyboard. When I play/record an instrument with the metronome it sounds in time, more or less - the human factor taken into account obviously. On play back though everything is earlier than the actual performance.

For years I thought my timing sucks and it does to a certain extent but not nearly as much as playback would make me believe.

Where is the evidence? Well, if I set the latency buffer really low (32 or 64) and I route my real time performance to an audio track (which is recording) and I record the midi as well, on playback the midi is always way earlier than the audio. In theory the audio should be slightly later because of the latency, right?

Now, the obvious thing here would be that the generic USB driver is bad, or the keyboard is bad, or something like that, but why is the live recorded audio so much closer to the grid, taking into consideration the latency obviously?

I initially thought it was Reaper placing the midi early but now that Studio One does it as well I am starting to think MIDI is broken in general?

I've actually done a whole song by only recording the midi to audio on the fly and it's way easier to edit.

Any ideas?