Ableton Forum

Hi, guys!
Can anyone help?
How can I synchronize two laptops playing Live to launch clips according to beats and so on? Or just give me a hint

Tons of info on the forum on this topic... try a search.

...or have a look in the (surprise surprise...) MANUAL!

if you gor a mac do a search for and get i midi, then you can sync using ethernet cable, took me a while to get sorted bt works pretty good. tip- make sure your firewall is turned off

on two macs with Tiger, the Midi over Network stuff is all built in to Audio/Midi Setup... works amazing, more amzing still over Airport... otherwise use MidiOverLan which costs but is cross platform..

a friend and I used to sync up two laptops. We found it very tricky to get perfect. We had out interfaces linked both ways via midi, there's some boxes u gotta make sure are highlighted appropriately in midi/sync section of the preferences. The slave has to high light the EXT button in the top left corner.

I saw a guy perform with 2 laptops simultaneously once. It looked pretty mad, and very prog rock (I'm thinking of emerson lake and palmer, with 2 x key synths at funny angles from one another) .... and I couldn't really see the practicality in it. Are you planning something similar? or are you having 2 laptoppers?

I run Live on 2 laptops which are both chasing MIDI clock from my controller keyboard (a Roland A-37). One does the drums and the other the instruments. This spreads the load, and should one laptop crash or lock up, it isn't going to take the other out with it.

I also have a (normally muted) track on each lappie playing a ruffmix of what the other is doing for any given scene. If one lappie dies, I can just unmute this track and fly on one engine with a minimum of grief while re-booting the other.

I keep getting error when trying to use airport now for midi.
Something to do with port 5504, but I don't understand why..
I had it working great with 10.4.2 but since then and before that version I can not do it.
I would appreciate advice as well if anyone else knows something
Got ethernet midi no problems at the moment between 2 pbooks

Pitch Black wrote:I run Live on 2 laptops which are both chasing MIDI clock from my controller keyboard (a Roland A-37). One does the drums and the other the instruments. This spreads the load, and should one laptop crash or lock up, it isn't going to take the other out with it.

I also have a (normally muted) track on each lappie playing a ruffmix of what the other is doing for any given scene. If one lappie dies, I can just unmute this track and fly on one engine with a minimum of grief while re-booting the other.

Hey Pitch Black have you ever had to unmute those tracks? It is an excellent idea I might need to use next month.

Yeah, maybe 3 or 4 times in the last couple of years. I'm a frustrated percussion player, so I know I'm going to bang the shit out of my controllers and possibly choke the MIDI interface/OS/Live etc. There will always be a chance of some unique variation of circumstances that is death to computers.

Ironically, this safety method was a side effect of deciding to run 2 lappies. We originally got 2 lappies because we have each outputting 8 individual audio outs into an analog desk for 16 channels of dub mixing. The idea of the backup track came after.

If we have a crash, the audience doesn't know a thing, going to just drums or just instruments for a few seconds is such a typical thing for electronic music.

Thank you all, this information is quite enough.
Now I'll try to cope with this task by myself/
Thanks for reminding me the manual

in my band we set same bpm and we synch manualy, if the machine it's ok and your body tempo are ok it stay for the whole set, otherwise use the one tap feature once on a while.


you can always do it with a midi, ethernet cable or wireless

freshdrumma wrote:in my band we set same bpm and we synch manualy, if the machine it's ok and your body tempo are ok it stay for the whole set, otherwise use the one tap feature once on a while.


you can always do it with a midi, ethernet cable or wireless

It's the most valuable piece of advice I've been given, especially the second one. Thanx, man, a lot!!!!

I've been warned about latency problems with MIDI over LAN/Wireless, but from the sound of things here it's pretty reliable. Is there a final word on this? It would certainly be nice not to have the cable soup of multiple MIDI/USB converters.

(My two laptop setup involves Max/MSP as a remote control device on one with Ableton running the music on the other.)

There is always MIDI latency (midi is a serial protocol after all). But it certainly isn't worse over LAN in my experience. I have had more success syncing over LAN than using conventional hardware. For sync, consistency is more important than latency ofcourse so YMMV.