Live 9 external MIDI sync is broken & terribly unstable

[squelcht]

I have submitted crash reports & requested technical support & yet still nobody cares to address this serious issue. Any version of Live 9 after 9.0.1 is unable to carry a stable MIDI sync. Simply put Live 9 cannot be synced by ANY external source. Once Live 9 is "slaved" to ANY external MIDI "master" clock, either it be another instance of Ableton running on another computer or drum machine/sequencer/etc - The "slave" instance of Ableton will crash either immediately or within minutes. It is a dreadfully horrific bug/glitch that has completely devasted my workflow. I would love to know if anyone else is suffering from the same issues & if so PLEASE address it so a fix can be both recognized & furthermore FIXED. I spent good money upgrading a software that in turn just f--ked me over. And to think yesterday Ableton went to twitter upon their official 9.0.4 release to ask people "how the new disco skin is changing their lifes" REally?!? F--king really?? Here stands a software that is designed like a house of cards & your interested in knowing how we feel about the disco skin??? My temper & patience cant even continue on this downward spiral of bulls--t. See my past log of rants and bitching. All Im asking (Here's looking at your DAVE) is that you recognize the issue & address it. Email me. F--ing text me. Collect call me, I'LL PAY FOR THE DAMN CHARGES. Just. Talk. To. Me. Thank you & Ra bless.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=192957

[BaronVonAbelDong]

Sorry to hear.

I have been running 9.02 slaved to Maschine's clock. I had to give up because the timing was out and the tempo was changing almost permanently to try and stay on beat.

Since seeing your post I tried again with 9.0.4 and it seems to be really tight now in comparison.

I haven't left it running long yet so will report back if it explodes. Just leaving a note here to let you know that I have yet to have a crash when slaving Live with Maschine, in Live 9. Maybe midi clock between software is different than with your outboard gear or other computers. Dunno.

I'm on a Macbook right now and it seems to be fine, thankfully.

Hope you find the reason mate but it doesn't seem to be right across the board (fingers crossed ).

Can you update this thread if you figure it out or they get back to you?

Cheers.

[squelcht]

Thanks for the reply! Are you using Maschine’s virtual MIDI outputs or the analog outputs on the back? I’m positive I used this same connection before & it ultimately led to a crash. That is really surprising to hear that you haven’t had a crash yet. *TRY THIS: Stop & restart Maschine’s clock a couple of times & see if you can cause Ableton to crash (instead of just hitting play & letting it continue on) I’ve had the strangest occurrences happen. Sometimes the set will continue on playing fine for a while & then BAM CRASH & then other times it would only be a minute or even immediately upon hitting play (regardless where the “master” clock is coming from i.e. another computer or drum machine/sequencer)

I will GLADLY keep you up to date on my systems performances & I hope you will too!

Cheers!

[BaronVonAbelDong]

Virtual outs. Have stopped and started repeatedly and tried to 'confuse' the software but works fine so far.

Am on a near clean install of both programs.

Just curious, did your syncing always stay locked tight when it was working before?

[squelcht]

Interesting you should ask…The clock would drift a few point decimals away from the original BPM, however this has always been the case with many versions of Live & yet I never had a crash due to this. I wonder if it is possible this is why a crash is happening (improper stable clocking?)
Curious question: Are you running Maschine as a VST inside of Ableton or are you using Maschine in standalone? If my memory serves me correct I thought you couldn’t properly use the Maschine’s virtual outputs to “slave” Ableton or control Ableton’s clock when using Maschine as a VST within Live…or can you do this now??? I used to use Maschine in standalone & used JackOS to route audio into Ableton just so I could use Maschines play/stop functions but eventually learned this setup was too complicated to keep on doing.
I have used an array of different sequencer modules to test this bug & everytime I’m getting the same results – ALSO might I mention the SAME was done to my production partners computer & he is getting the same crash results as I am. Crazy huH?!?!?
Thanks for participating in this thread, your input is insanely highly appreciated

[BaronVonAbelDong]

Don't use Maschine as a VST much, might do one day. I actually would like parts of Live as a VST for Maschine

The clock isn't drifting big for me now, at least it's not audible anymore so far, so need to thank you for the prompt to check midi clock again. 9.0.2 wasn't good for me at all.

Sorry I can't help out with anything more at the moment but will update if it does crash.

[squelcht]

Thanks again for your guidance! I TOTALLY agree with wanting to use Live as a VST haha...

[JuanSOLO]

I slave Live from a Tempest via USB, no crashes, but slaving Live has always seemed to keep slopppy timing.

I went to a studio session once with Live 8, the mixing engineer gave me his clock and Live would jump all over in BPM, it was embarrassing, he was using a state of the art pro tools system.

Since then I have not trusted Live as slave, and currently switched back to using it as master to run my gear while waiting for a hardware sequencer to arrive. When Live is in slave mode midi notes running through Live have unpredictable to NO duration when Live is not running, really weird.

[mikb]

. Once Live 9 is "slaved" to ANY external MIDI "master" clock, either it be another instance of Ableton running on another computer or drum machine/sequencer/etc - The "slave" instance of Ableton will crash either immediately or within minutes.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=192957

Last night a friend and I tried to sync our two Macbooks running Live 9.04 and on both our machines the CPU usage meter went up to 240 - 2.800% and any simple song was crackling horribly. No crashes though, but perhaps they would have been coming if we kept at it?

As a contrast Live 8.2.8 did at least work without the CPU spikes, but we both feel Live 9 sounds so much better than 8, so we'd rather not go back to 8. Also, soon Push will arrive and I think this need Live 9.

Anyone can tell if Rewire sync works better in practice? Perhaps some other piece of software supporting Rewire on the slave machine could sync to the Master machine and natively sync the other Live via Rewire? Convoluted, yes, but worth exploring?

I also, understand for some people syncing the 2 copies on 2 machines to an external clock could also work, but why this would be so beats me. Probably not in Live 9 anyway.

It's about time for Ableton to fix External Sync! How do you affect Ableton effectively. Organised Phone Campaign? Campaign web site?

[threenines]

I would do anything to have faith in external sync. gotta be more people than us

[theinfinate]

I would do anything to have faith in external sync. gotta be more people than us

Yeah for sure, the external midi sync issues makes it unusable, where is ableton's support staff. I wonder if there are any other program's like Live that work properly

[mikb]

Update: I'm happy to report that as of Live 9.1 all sync issues over cable* have been cleared to the point of making it possible to work together and compose in the studio. We haven't evaluated a performance situation yet. Before this version I had made a bug report to Ableton.

This was great news I think.

*Ableton suggests Wifi is not reliable enough.