Ableton Forum

First of all, I love Live. It is by far the most innovative piece of music software that I have ever encountered. The only thing that could be more stream of consciousness would be to connect a wire from my brain to the P.A.!!!

But it is extremely disappointing that I cannot reliably sync up to Live with external midi devices (drift-o-rama!!!). Reason, Logic, Digital Performer all do it flawlessly, so I know it's possible with my hardware (Midiman Midisport 8x8). What is the missing link Ableton? My 909 and Nord Modular are dying to join the party!!!

Is anyone else out there frustrated by this?

I tried the new 1.5b2 today and ran it for over an hour with no real issues. Only problem I had was when Live was Midi master, the midi slaves didn't sync well with Live. I was using G4/500 powerbook with an Oxygen8. The slaves would only sync once in a while and it was a pain to try to get it working right, and then when you hit stop and play again it would be off sync.

So we switched to having Live be a slave and everything was VERY TIGHT and solid. But at that point we were using the MidiSport 2x2 for input. Will try to remember to use it for output next time.

Other than that, overall CPU usage seems to be down quite a good amount and I had no probs with performance.

bioroid

Got the 1.5b2 -- same midi sync problems (mac os 9 and os x). I've tried a TR-909 as the master and slave, and a Nord modular as the slave. With Live as the master, it seems to send a "continue" message when you start it up (instead of a "start" message) -- so when you start Live, any slave devices just continue from the position where they last stopped instead of starting from the start. When I use the 909 as the master, the tempo drifts badly. It's so bad that I can notice it within about 2 bars.

Exactly. When Live is master, hitting start did seem to tell the slaves to continue. When we used Live as a slave we used a Korg ES-1 as a master and had no problems. Ran for 15 minutes with solid timing, no drifting.

bioroid