And no, I have not been "silenced" by anyone except for me having better things to do than running into walls. Atm I'm trying to get better accoustics out of my room and need to paint a wall for my lady that she first wanted to be pink but now prefers to have red like the rest of the walls. 
I do have to correct myself in that I stated before that Live cannot even handle the full bandwidth of the Midi protocol (3250 bytes/s), it can and does that better than Reaper (and Sonar crashed when I tried). I was stupid before and calculated the amount of Midi bytes wrong, my apologies.
The number of Midi ports/channels Live can master/handle concurrently depends on several things (unfortunately the Midi Facts Sheet isn't very informative on this part):
- the audio-interface/driver being used
- the audio-buffer size
- the midi-interface/driver being used: Midi latency and jitter is induced by both of these by design! Best results can be obtained via PCI or FW Midi interfaces, USB comes last in that for all my own interfaces (the Remote SL is worst).
- your mainboard, or better the precision timers offered by your mainboard and either Windows' or Live's decision which of those to use for its own timings (only Vista can use the new High Precision Timers of current mainboards)
- wether Midi clips are fired all at once or one after another (with a
- a combination of the aforementioned
(- on Vista Live's performance depends alot on what the rest of your system is busy with. On my system Live is not useable with my Fireface 400 on Vista at all (no Aero trick helping), not even a single audio clip plays without drop-outs. Furthermore Live's CPU load increases when the CPU load of Windows Explorer increases, including ugly drop-outs. No problem running dozends of the same clip in Reaper on Vista. I will contact support of both Ableton and RME to see if they care to look into it.)
Concerning Live as a Midi Master with Midi Clock Sync. Whenever Live's Audio or Midi engine overloads and/or the Midi driver of your interface reaches its limit (both even at low CPU load) it will produce drop-outs on the Midi port, thus the Sync clock becomes unstable. With Midi note/data streams this will also lead to data corruption (like pitch-shift/cc/whatever arriving at your destination Midi instrument when in reality a note on was sent).
This is not only Live's fault, but also attributes to the limits of the drivers. For example, Midi Yoke can handle a maximum of around 4916 bytes/s (the equivalent of playing 128 1/16th Midi notes concurrently at 96 bpm) with both Live and Reaper on my machine, from there on it will start to corrupt data.
3dot if you provide me with your exact setup (and maybe your Live set) I can try to get the most out of it and send it through all my 8 Midi interfaces and three audio-cards to see if any combination works. Generally I wouldn't trust Live to be my Midi Master though, better use an external Midi clock. I tried to make my Remote SL master once, but couldn't make it send Midi commands to Live to make it start playing. Didn't have enough time then though and was only playing around, it ought to work somehow. No problems making my Korg 01/W's internal sequencer a Master Clock with start/stop transports though.
