The Truth about clock syncing and live...

[3phase]

As metioned on this forum here in the past...

Midi clock syncing often sucks... regardless on which software platform..some are better..some are worse... and it all depends on the associated hardware aswell...

Measuring the accuracy of the midi clock or the output of a synced system is a time consuming task...

you do test recordings and measur if the distance between the events stays equal or not... defemtly tme consuming when you do this by hand...
However.. i finly made an Reaktor ensemble that is doing the measuring for me... so i was todayx able to get quite some infos within a short time...

So here some results in short...
And all of cause realted to my hardware/software configuration...
different settings might lead to different results..

1) midi clock out of Live is very good on apple computers... close to the clock quality of an atari computer...
This wasnt all times like this..... but on actual systems we have clock jitter in the 0,1 ms range.. not 2 ms like in eralier times...

Live was much better than logic in this disziplin

2) internal midi clocking of Reaktor is very good within live.. but its tempo related...
i get some glitches when having bpm settongs that cant propperly be divided within the 44.1k samplerate i use..
If this are glitches of the measuring or real lost clock pulses? should be evaluated with more test

Live was much better than logic in this disziplin

3) external clockin of live with midi clock...

first... most other programs dont offer this possibility... and live had a variyng performance of those feature over the years...
however..
actual versions on mac do good within 1 ms jitter..thats a good value bevause i had measurements in the past where this was above 5ms..
however would be nice if this could be as good as the clock output...

however..the only maschine i measured sofar that was able to be as good as master than as slave was the akai mpc 3000..
which is still the refference machine for sync accuracy..


So why some people have issues?

First... On windows pc my measuremets showed disgusting results..if this only applys to my old 2,4 ghz windows pc or to all windows based systems i cant tell..
But.. there are windows systems out ther wher you beter dont try to sync anything with a midi clock.. at least when accuracy is an issue..
Especially house related genres need accuracy for example while for drum and base 2 ms more or less just sound more "alive"


One other possibility that might lead to sync problems is the way live reacts on the start comand..

thats ot so easy to measure as the accuracy of the clock.. But i did a test with slaving 2 instances of live on 2 computers to one clockmaster via network midi ..didnt worked..
I have to repeat that with hardware midi.. but the test pointed to possible issues with lives reaktion to an incoming start command..
When this is not performed correctly the clock can stay as stable as it wants but the systems would only in tempo sync but not event synced.



Beside that point that should be evaluated live on an apple computer should be an excellent clock master and a pretty "decend" slave... which is in a world where daw´s usually dont slave to midiclock at all a very good result.

With the fireface 400 it was possible to run 2 differnet delayed clocks over the 2 ports perfectly..

trying the same with an emagic mt4 didit worked at all..



If some other users want to test theier systems.. you can find the reaktor ensemble here
https://co.native-instruments.com/index ... tchid=9005

or for pc users that dont have access to the libary
www.3phase.de/Test/ClockJitterScope.ens.zip


If somebody has good results on a windows pc it would be nice to let us know..
because wright now i personally could not work with a pc and live as clockmaster...
Logic 5.5 on my pc was halfways ok but live with up to 5ms variation between clockpulses :-/

Wouldbe really nice to know if its possible to have a better clock performance on a windows pc..

[3phase]

no comments about the shocking bad clocking on pc´s ? )

or a report what windows 7 can do? because its not so correct to messure the latest os x against a stinky xp..??



funny that logic 5.5 has a much better clock jitter performance on widows pc than live... and allmost equals the performance of logic 8 on mac..exept that the 5.5 pc version is more stable in the performance..


Emagic dont values clock stabilty as high as ableton does..thats a pretty clear result in my tests.. but why does ableton thas a worse performance on windows than logic than?
probably its hardware related..or some system settings?
Or does this show the possebility for optimisations?

So far it allways seemed that ableton is more beneficial on the pc platform..or is running better there..
regarding clocking my measurements seem to indicate thats not the case at all..that live performs on a mac the factor 10 to 20 better in questions of precission..

Is that true?

some pc fans should make the effort to proove me wrong..

at least i am curious if the difference is really that big...


All this strange and slightly cotradictonary resuts probably show that

[leedsquietman]

Windows suffers because of 2 different protocols, MME and DirectMIDI (and worst still 'emulated' DirectMIDI) none of which are as tight as CoreMIDI in Mac OSX. Neither W7 or Vista brought anything new to the table in this regard. Live does not have timestamp on/off unlike some other DAWS, it is always set to on, but occasionally some hardware performs better with it off (the majority of the time ON is best though).

Also, hardware is a key issue. In spite of MME and DirectMIDI, some of the tightest MIDI clocking I ever saw was with Steinberg's MIDEX 8, which ran LTB drivers
http://www.steinbergcanada.com/products ... midex8.htm

Unfortunately, they discontinued it and it was proprietary to Steinberg and these interfaces, long since loved and highly regarded will not work in Vista or Win 7.

The Atari ST was tight on MIDI clock with Steinberg Pro 24 and early Cubase, although not because of Atari because of Steinberg (and Emagic on Notator / Logic) writing improved MIDI drivers, but remember, it did not have to sync with audio as the ST wasn't capable of processing MIDI and audio simultaneously All the audio went into multitrack analog tape recorders, or those on the cutting edge were just starting with ADAT.

[3phase]

yep.. thats the reason i take the atari as refference ..even when some drummachines are even better regarding clocksyncing the atari has been prooven to be good enogh as clockmaster and slave...


so its a fact than that windows based systems are not good for clocking?

there is a guy in berlin that works for scheiders büro that had made a device that allows windows pcs a clockoutput as stable as the audio clock... seems his unit is essential for people that work on windows oc´s and want theire hardware sequencers and drummachines clocked tight..

[leedsquietman]

I would say that typically it is easier for Mac developers as they have one solid standard, as opposed to 2 or more in windows, although some developers have written some excellent drivers for mme and direct midi too. It's a little over simplistic to say Mac has better MIDI. What they have is one solid protocol to work on.

Microsoft really have p*ssed me off with both Vista and Windows 7 in bringing almost nothing extra for audio and midi protocol. The stuff they have developed (such as the poorly supported WaveRT) is more aimed at the gaming universe. The generic ASIO driver set to 20ms in and out is also not good enough for low latency DAW work.

They should have come out with one definitive protocol for MIDI by now like Apple did when they released OSX. Before the usual suspects flame me, this does not mean that audio and midi is weak or unuseable in windows - what it does mean is that developers of PC products have to work harder to develop their drivers. Nothing more, nothing less. But all the confusion, having to write 2 different standards of driver, practically means that Mac is more easily configured and has less performance variance. Read into that what you want.

[Pasha]

I would say that typically it is easier for Mac developers as they have one solid standard, as opposed to 2 or more in windows, although some developers have written some excellent drivers for mme and direct midi too. It's a little over simplistic to say Mac has better MIDI. What they have is one solid protocol to work on.

Microsoft really have p*ssed me off with both Vista and Windows 7 in bringing almost nothing extra for audio and midi protocol. The stuff they have developed (such as the poorly supported WaveRT) is more aimed at the gaming universe. The generic ASIO driver set to 20ms in and out is also not good enough for low latency DAW work.

They should have come out with one definitive protocol for MIDI by now like Apple did when they released OSX. Before the usual suspects flame me, this does not mean that audio and midi is weak or unuseable in windows - what it does mean is that developers of PC products have to work harder to develop their drivers. Nothing more, nothing less. But all the confusion, having to write 2 different standards of driver, practically means that Mac is more easily configured and has less performance variance. Read into that what you want.

I like it when you're so clear.
Peter Gabriel and many others use Live on Stage, most of the times if not all
Live runs on a Mac. Maybe it's only hype but after your explanation I start to understand more...

@3DPhase : Thank you for this post. 100% useful.

[3phase]

I would say that typically it is easier for Mac developers as they have one solid standard, as opposed to 2 or more in windows, although some developers have written some excellent drivers for mme and direct midi too. It's a little over simplistic to say Mac has better MIDI. What they have is one solid protocol to work on.
.

thats true.. apples own logic still wobbles around like being on an old os 9 mac...

while abletons clock shows thats possible now to have such good avlues on an apple computer..

and on the other side..logic 5.5 years old..has the better midi drivers than live 7...


It would be great if some reaktor owners that are on cubase on mac could do some measurements and post the result here..

i will do myself as soon i come to a studio that has a cubase system installed...