Ableton Forum

g'day

it's been a few years since i tried to sync live between 2 notebooks.

im wondering from your current experiences, if you are having more luck with midi ports or some kind of midi over LAN solution. your advice about this will save us a little time and money on buying/trialling sound card/midi solutions.

if i go the LAN route between our 2 macbooks, should i use a crossover cable or a straight ethernet will work?

any thoughts would be appreciated.

For our concerts we sync over midi with my macbook and a motu ultralite as slave and my bandmates macbook and up until now a fasttrack pro as master. This works fine as long as you don't do too much midistuff simultaneously apparently. we had it running fine for hours and then suddenly going out of sync. I believe this happens when cpu and/or soundcard are processing a big load of midi data. But I could be wrong, never did real scientific testing on that. Also we had the fasttrack pro crashing a couple of times now, it must be defective after two years ... my mate got an ultralite mk3 this week and I am looking forward to have it working better, as we play an important concert soon. Next weeks rehearsal we will try, and I want to try midi-sync over network-cable as well.

Another bad thing about midi sync is that you can adjust the sync fine for one speed, and have both laptops running fine, but then for a different bpm they might be slightly off again.

I always had satisfactory results with 2 MBP's chasing a common external MIDI clock, though similar to what Pepe said, there could be a little bit of "wow and flutter" - though nothing too unmusical or distracting. If for example I opened a blank song on each MBP and turned both metronomes on, and ran the two machines in sync, the metronome ticks would drift subtly against each other something like this: Tick - *cancel* - phase - phase - Tick - phase - Ttick - Tick - phase - ... etc etc. Kind of almost a "human" variation, still well within the realms of acceptable but not phase-locked.

I've read quite a few posts about MIDI timing issues with Live as the master clock, so didn't explore this deeply, but an external MIDI clock source for both could be the way to go. Find that old Boss drum machine, or something.

anyone using LAN to connect MIDI sync between 2 x macs?

what kind of LANc onnection have you got running?

sweetjesus wrote:anyone using LAN to connect MIDI sync between 2 x macs?

what kind of LANc onnection have you got running?

Ive done this a few times lately! You can run an ethenet cable, or set-up a wireless network on one mac, and have the other mac join that network... It works pretty well but it is pretty much as Pitch Black said above, it fluctuates in and out of sync. Pretty usable though....

Once youre computers are connected go to Audio/MIDI preferences app, its in the utilities folder, im sure you know the one i mean!

dan

Pitch Black wrote:I always had satisfactory results with 2 MBP's chasing a common external MIDI clock, though similar to what Pepe said, there could be a little bit of "wow and flutter" - though nothing too unmusical or distracting. If for example I opened a blank song on each MBP and turned both metronomes on, and ran the two machines in sync, the metronome ticks would drift subtly against each other something like this: Tick - *cancel* - phase - phase - Tick - phase - Ttick - Tick - phase - ... etc etc. Kind of almost a "human" variation, still well within the realms of acceptable but not phase-locked.

I've read quite a few posts about MIDI timing issues with Live as the master clock, so didn't explore this deeply, but an external MIDI clock source for both could be the way to go. Find that old Boss drum machine, or something.

this is my experience to. But i've synced to macs using one as a master. I've actually done it with three. And i only had one midi out so we did it like this:

1. mac send midi to mac 2.
2. mac gets midi from me and send that midi to mac 3
3. mac gets midi from mac 2.


then we turned on metronomes and adjusted the delaytime.

Worked like a charm. The little fluttering that pitch black is saying is only human or musical so it just sounds good imo

I've had success with syncing via Live's clock, you may need to adjust the midi offset times to get them in sync but once it's locked it was solid for me.

Mind you, we were doing audio stuff with controllers providing the only MIDI data so not really heavy MIDI usage there...

I had no success at all with MIDI over LAN but whichever program you use will have full documentation on how to set it up.


Good luck, you'll love the 2 laptops in sync - it adds a whole new dimension to live!!!


DoA