Ableton Forum

Ok, my mate and I are planning on hooking our laptops up for some live action.
I know that basically I connect my laptop (master) to his (slave) using my midi out to his midi in. There are a few things I wish to check out first though...
He has a pc whilst I have a mac and he is still on ableton 5 where as I have 6. Will this have an adverse affect?
Any tips too please
x

PC/Mac and Live 5/6 should work fine together. Midi sync can be a bit unstable (ie starts to drift after a while) but it can also work perfectly fine. Experiment with using either computer as master.

You could try midi over a lan for more stability/lower latency:

http://www.nerds.de/en/ipmidi.html

http://www.nerds.de/en/ipmidi_osx.html

You only need a cross over ethernet cable between you computers.

Or use a 3rd device (keyboard,sequencer,MPC,drum machine) as a MIDI clock master for both computers. My band's live setup uses MIDI clock from a Roland A-37 kbd controller to run two Macs.

That is an excellent idea. External hardware tends to have more stable midi clocks than a computer, probably because the CPU load is known and tested and/or they have specific hardware for the clock stuff.