Ableton Forum

can anyone think of a way to get Live to sync to an incoming audio source? (especially one with an obvious rhythm - like a drum machine)


For example, I'd like to feed Live an input from a drum machine (in my case the DM1 ipad app) and have it recognise the tempo, then have Live slave to this (allowing an easy way of jamming with Live over the top of a drum machine).



The manual way to do this would be to launch the drum machine, then play Live, and use the pitch-bend buttons to sync the two up (like mixing two records). In theory this should stay in sync (if both Live and the drum machine are set to the same tempo) - though I'm sure, in practice, they would drift... and even if they did stay locked, it would require re-syncing every time the tempo was changed.


Another way would be to spit a MIDI-out from the DM1 (ipad app) into Live, and then sync to this. But this would require extra hardware that i haven't got.

So, returning to my original question; can anyone think of a way to automatically sync Live to an incoming audio source? (using a Max app, perhaps?)

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an automatic function (although I'm no M4L expert). Even if you did, it would never be flawless. When ableton analyses a track you bring in to try to find it's tempo and set up a sort of "beat grid" (to use traktor esque terms) it does so taking a few seconds and it's rarely perfect. I'm not sure I see ableton pulling it off real time.

Word of warning too, I've had some ugly experiences with midi clock and ableton. It seems to be hideously laggy and jumpy. This was attempting to sync two computers though, which I eventually discovered was best done over a computer network. I'm not sure if this kind of option is available with your iPad app?

Finally the last thing that might be worth trying; have you given tap tempo a shot? You'd still have to monitor it and do some manual nudging, depends a bit on what your intended application is (on stage/in studio?).

Text deleted. I just realized you want to sync without extra hardware

launching both devices as close together as possible, then tightening with the tempo-nudge buttons is working for me (for studio jamming).

And they seem to stay pretty closely synced.

If you've got max you could try using the bonk~ external to detect drum hits and use this as an input to a timer which could set the transport bpm. A non max solution would be to transmit midi clock over a wlan?

The Looper Device has a Follow Song Tempo Function, but you'll have to Tap Tempo, It has Quantization and it could be very accurate.