Using SynergyKM with Ableton Live (OSX)

[fracturetrey]

I use two workstations side-by-side in my studio; one is a Mac and one is a PC. My mouse and keyboard are attached to my PC, and I use a piece of software called Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net) as a host on my PC and SynergyKM (http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm) as a client on my Mac to share the mouse and keyboard between both computers. I run Ableton on the Mac, but am in and out of Sound Forge on the PC side throughout my production process.

Live is the first program I've ever had issues controlling using this setup. Normal mouse movement and clicking work fine, but I find when I need to clig and drag, such as to zoom in and out of a set or to move a breakpoint or automation line, Live reacts erraticly. It's as if some form of acceleration is being applied or misinterpreted, and once you start moving the object in one direction, it's impossible to get it to move in the other. Also, the scale of movement seems to increase very quickly the longer the mouse button is held.

For the interim I have resorted to reaching up and using the Mac's built-in touchpad to do Live navigation, but this is ergonomincally tiring and I am curious if it might be possible for someone to identify the cause of this issue. Again, Live is the only program in which I've experienced any abnormal mouse behavior at all with Synergy; scroll bars and clicking and dragging everywhere else in OSX works fine.

Thanks in advance for any consideration.

[toupeira]

Have a look at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.p ... tid=490467, in short the solution is to enable relative mouse movements on the server and then lock the screen to the client using ScrollLock. If you do this the mouse should work fine and you can also use the client's mouse settings to change speed etc.

[fracturetrey]

Thank you so much! This works like a charm, though as noted in the comments on that link, you must enable Scroll Lock when you have the mouse on the client screen in order for the relative movements to be enabled, otherwise it suffers the same problem still. You rock, thanks again!

[toupeira]

You're welcome, that comment on SourceForge was actually by me

I stumbled over your posting while looking for a solution, so I thought I'd share...

[fracturetrey]

A better fix I found for not having to toggle Scroll Lock on and off all the time is to stick "-absoluteMouseMode" into your Options.txt file.

More info about how to do this can be found here: http://www.ableton.com/pages/faq/options_text