Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
de wouzer
Posts: 236
Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 4:06 pm

Re:

Post by de wouzer » Mon Dec 21, 2009 11:13 pm

Tone Deft wrote:dudes, you're making all this waaaay too complicated.

1 midi cable
EXT button set on the slaved Live
SYNC out on the master Live
SYNC in on the slave Live

hit spacebar and go. I've done this literally dozens of times with various combinations of macs, PCs, Live 6, Live 5, sound cards, synths, mpcs...

for MIDI mapped control just enable REMOTE IN/OUT on the computers.

open the help box and hover over the midi remote/sync/track buttons, it's all there.

if things go awry, unset all the boxes and start simple, no need to close the preferences box, settings are enacted immediately.
this is what I do The strange thing is, that the slave tempo changes all the time. I don't know why... the real tempo stays the same... but the displayed tempo changes.

Is this very stable? I had some strange experiences... and I don't know why.... doesn't really feel good for Live Settings.
macbook 2.4 ghz 2 gig ram, akai MPK 25, uc33e, apc40, ableton 8 suite, krk vx6, NI audio 8

Thomas
Posts: 153
Joined: Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:29 pm
Location: Rotterdam, NL

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Thomas » Sat Feb 06, 2010 4:18 pm

oke this might be an old thread but i need help

we're syncing two macbook pro's over wireless.
I have sync and remote out
my friend has sync and remote in, and ext enabled.
Works fine, but his master tempo fluctuates all the time, looks like its trying to make up for delay or something, but it just doesnt stay on it.
I have 85 bpm set, his tempo goes from 80 to 90 back and forth.
The midi setup has been done as the guide on the second post of this thread

any help?


B-S
Posts: 85
Joined: Tue Mar 06, 2007 10:38 am

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by B-S » Tue Feb 09, 2010 2:20 pm

got same problem while syncing two laptops. slave clock goes crazy and drifts all the time. guess this really doesnt work, and i am bit curious why ableton didnt fix this SERIOUS issue,.

Thomas
Posts: 153
Joined: Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:29 pm
Location: Rotterdam, NL

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Thomas » Tue Feb 09, 2010 9:35 pm

and i'm curious about people saying their wireless sync is fine?
I've got 1 ms latency i think, and latency adjustement doesnt work for me

mersault
Posts: 78
Joined: Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:49 am

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by mersault » Sat Feb 13, 2010 6:27 pm

...just hoping to get some responses on this thread too. I read through what's here, but I'm not sure it addresses what I (and Thomas) seem to want to do - Synching two laptops to be played by two different people. I don't need to do it wirelessly.

ill-legal?
Posts: 28
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 6:19 pm
Location: Phompton
Contact:

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by ill-legal? » Sat Feb 13, 2010 6:49 pm

I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to get this MIDI sync going flawlessly between two Mac laptops with only moderate success at best. One thing that helped was using ipMidi, although typically around the 45 minute mark of our joint set we’d find that the slave began to drift to the point that it started to sound like a trainwreck. We also tried using my friends MPC as an external timecode source, and that worked a little better until I started using my controller to trigger clips (versus clicking via trackpad) at which point everything went to sh*t. Very frustrated with this whole process, so until Ableton gets this issue resolved, I’ve put it to the side.

viniciusfontes
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 8:45 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by viniciusfontes » Thu Mar 25, 2010 11:23 am

I can also confirm that midi network sync is completely broken on Live. I noticed that if I set a very low tempo (about 60bpm) it works kinda fine, the bpm variation on the slave is minimum. On the other hand, on "normal" tempos like 125bpm it's completely useless. Variation from 123 to 130bpm (!) is commonplace. For curiosity's sake I cranked up the tempo to 999bpm, and the variation on the slave was priceless. Saw it dropping to under 800bpm, about 20% variation.

At one point I used wireshark to capture network traffic and check if there were excessive latency, jitter or lost packets. Nada. Latency were always under 0.4ms (gigabit ethernet is wonderful, isn't it?), no packet loss, no jitter. Also tried to increase CPU priority of Ableton and MIDIserver processes via the renice terminal command, same thing. I guess I pretty much covered everything external to Ableton that could be causing the slave to simply not being able to sync to the master, to no avail. Unfortunely I don't have any midi devices I could use to sync the laptops via vanilla MIDI, but I heard not even that works fine.

Too bad Ableton doesn't want to fix this and blames it on everything and the kitchen sink.

Manik
Posts: 51
Joined: Thu Jul 09, 2009 11:26 am
Location: Haarlem / The Netherlands

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Manik » Thu Mar 25, 2010 11:36 am

i'm also having problems with midisync,

we jam/perform live with 2 macbooks ableton linked over midi (tempo)
sometimes the tempo's drift away, also the beatrepeat on the slave pc wont change grid normally and sometime freezes
anybody who knows i can prevent this?

it cant be that difficult to make some aplication to link the tempo's 100% precise???

viniciusfontes
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 8:45 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by viniciusfontes » Thu Mar 25, 2010 2:03 pm

Manik wrote:it cant be that difficult to make some aplication to link the tempo's 100% precise???
Apparently for Ableton it is.

Tone Deft
Posts: 24152
Joined: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:19 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Tone Deft » Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:07 pm

viniciusfontes wrote:
Manik wrote:it cant be that difficult to make some aplication to link the tempo's 100% precise???
Apparently for Ableton it is.
trscks fine on my machine.

so, yeah, blame Ableton, it can't possibly be user error.
In my life
Why do I smile
At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?
-Moz

viniciusfontes
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 8:45 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by viniciusfontes » Thu Mar 25, 2010 11:59 pm

Tone Deft wrote:
viniciusfontes wrote:
Manik wrote:it cant be that difficult to make some aplication to link the tempo's 100% precise???
Apparently for Ableton it is.
trscks fine on my machine.

so, yeah, blame Ableton, it can't possibly be user error.
I've googled a lot, tried tinkering with every single config possible to no avail. In this forum and many others you'll find a lot of users with the same problem.

Would you mind explain how you achieved this feat and giving some details like Live version you're running, hardware you're using, etc?

Tone Deft
Posts: 24152
Joined: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:19 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Tone Deft » Fri Mar 26, 2010 12:28 am

there was a time when I couldn't get it to sync, I definitely feel your pain. I just didn't know if you created the account to gripe or to get to a solution.


this is an older description from June of '09 when I was trying to help someone over e-mail (so the language might read weird and I'm too lazy to change it.)

Live 8.03
HP DV8000 laptop Centrino Duo 2GHz, 2Gb RAM
google tells me that this is the motherboard
http://www.portablecomponentsforall.com ... 41202.html

setup:
PC -USB-> Linksys 7 port hub
hub -USB-> BCR -MIDI-> Roland JX305 (keyboard version of the MC505)
hub -USB-> Novation SL25 -MIDI-> MPC1000 JJOS
hub -USB-> Edirol UA101 -MIDI-> nothing. in my test I tried this on each device and got the same results.


MME port type, song clock type for everything.
512 sample buffer 96kHz.

hth, it's great when it works, sucks when it doesn't.
In my life
Why do I smile
At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?
-Moz

Amplidude
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2009 2:43 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by Amplidude » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:24 pm

I just found something interesting for sync.....

http://mungo.com.au/

http://www.upbeat.ch/product_info.php?i ... a92ebef87d

viniciusfontes
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 8:45 pm

Re: Please help me sync two laptops with live on both!!

Post by viniciusfontes » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:58 pm

The thing is, I really don't think Mac OS' network midi sync is the culprit here. I've synced other stuff using it and it works great. I've seen people complaining that Ableton as a midi slave doesn't work not even when you're using midi hardware as a master.

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