Ableton Forum

Hi,
I am planning to do live gigs with a friend. Both are playing in ableton live 7/8. He's on mac and I am on XP. I got a presonus FP10, and I don't know what interface he's using. I want my laptop to be the slave.
What's the best way ? Is there any ethernet option ? How stable is it ? (I need it to be 100%, of course...) What bad things did you experienced ?
Thank you very much.

i am looking for the same thing, if possible 3 laptops.....we were trying 2 laptops recieving midi clock from Bitstream 3x but there are some serious delay issues after a while....also conecing via midi from nay of the soundcards ... any help?

thanks a lot, very interesting, but a bit far from me right now...

I don't know if things have changed but a while ago ableton was useless as a midi-clock master.
It was impossible to get our laptops proper in sync.So we decided to use a korg electribe as midi-clock master. The midi-out of the electribe goes into a midi-thru-box and from the thru-box to our laptops.


cheers

That would be a shame...

i read an article saying that you don't need a master...

this was coming from the ableton guys themselves

once you either start both at the same time or nudge them into place they will not drift unless you glitch your computer out

you can say you "need" it but....you really don't

hurlingdervish wrote:i read an article saying that you don't need a master...

this was coming from the ableton guys themselves

once you either start both at the same time or nudge them into place they will not drift unless you glitch your computer out

this is true, and whne jamming techno or similar it's the best method. sync by ear and let it flow.
(but don't overload you computer, so it jumps and gets out of sync!)

but what do you do when you have tempo changes or a couple of songs with different tempos that you want to play? Then sync by midi is better.

Only downside: the slave will drift, and if you do live looping this is bad. Because when you record a loop you want to reproduce it without warping artifacts. or pitch going up and down. Or when you record clips having nasty yellow warp markers all over the place.

But depending on hardware, amount of midi-data being processed and cpu-load the drift can be less or more. Apparently the midi-sync-signal can get affected by all of these factors. We had very different results with different livesets on the same hardware. And very different results with different soundcards/midi-interfaces.

and: For me it was working quite good with live 5. since then it's getting worse all the time - but this could also be due to the fact that my hardware config has changed since then ...

Really nice tip thanks for sharing

pepezabala wrote: But depending on hardware, amount of midi-data being processed and cpu-load the drift can be less or more. Apparently the midi-sync-signal can get affected by all of these factors. We had very different results with different livesets on the same hardware. And very different results with different soundcards/midi-interfaces.

Same here. But for us it's a little bit annoying if your midi-clock is so unpredictable. You have to be afraid to turn a knob in your FX becaus it could affect your master-clock. And nudging is no possibilty for us at the moment.

chhers

Ableton has really stepped up the midi clock during version 7... and it seems to be even better with 8.

Ever looked in midi over lan? You could connect the three lap tops to a network hub and network them and then run one as a master.

With ableton 7+ you can also compensate for the delay that might be present. There's a setting in ableton's preferences under the midi port but also you can offset each individual track.

But yes there's a free midi over lan utility.... Or I think you could use a midi to osc converter.

We struggled with syncing two laptops running Live with lots of tempo changes and transitions for YEARS. The solution:

Buy an old MOTU AV Timepiece on Ebay (I got mine for $80), run it standalone, and sync your computers with Midi Timecode. It is the only solution I've tried thats always rock solid and never gets off.

Using timecode does require some other workarounds but, it also has advantages. If two laptops are running the at 120, one person can stop, bring in a new tempo, then the second person can stop and join them at that tempo. It makes transitions much more natural.

We have a rock solid approach. Here's what you can do:

1. Buy a crossover LAN cable and connect the two computers directly together (no router/hub/switch in between).
2. Set up the LAN connection on each computer to use a static IP address in the same subnet (you need to do this manually since you will have no DHCP server dolling out IP addresses like in a normal network). e.g. 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.2.1
3. Download a midi-over-Ethernet application. We use ipMidi (http://nerds.de/en/ipmidi.html) and it has never failed us. It cost $80 for a license but having struggled with drifting midi timing for so long, it was so worth it!!! If you're not sure you want to spend the $$, you can download a free trial and test it out - the program will remain active for 60 minutes, at which point it times out and you have to restart the program.

If you're connecting more than 2 computers together, then replace the cross-over cable with a simple network switch and do the same things in steps 2 and 3. You could even run timing over a wireless network but then you're increasing the risk a bit more (albeit marginally).

Stable. Reliable. FAST.

Your pals from musicfirm.
http://www.musicfirm.ca

That is good info, thank you.

I’ve only ever managed to get a stable sync using MTC generated by MIDI OX and running both copies of Live as slave.

We used the midi in outs to connect rather than Ethernet.

Fake_account gives a marvellous description of how to set this up here: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=123021