Syncing two Live systems

DES · Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:18 am Post subject: Syncing two Live systems

I'm pretty new to using Live. I've heard that Live doesn't follow sync well, unfortunately, but I need two sync two computers running Live. I could send midi clock via Midi or possibly RTPMidi. I'm not sure how I can get one to follow the other though wrt stop, play, scene select...there doesn't seem to be a controller setup for using another session of Live as a controller..

Any suggestions?

Antimon · Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 5:14 am Post subject:

Me and a friend used to mess around with jamming in Live on two computers. We started by using one of the Live computers as master for the other, but we had problems with drifting out of sync. After trying some different solutions we resorted to having a third device (my Octatrack) as sync master. We used a thru box to fan out the midi connections from the octatrack to each computer. With that setup we rarely had any problems.

DES · Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 7:01 am Post subject:

Thanks for the tip.
I'll have to look and see what I have that can provide sync.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 9:58 am Post subject:

At the electro-music 2011 In C ensemble Andrew Koenig supplied the MIDI clock and the rest of us used it. I used it as input to Live with no problem. I don't know what he used as a source, but a simple hardware device seems like a good idea.

EDIT: Recording posted here.

DES · Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2014 12:13 am Post subject:

Thanks for the ideas!

For the NYE 2013 performance I used RTPMidi between the two computers and it seemed to work ok. The slave was running the ARP 2600 and iPad audio stuff so if timing got a bit wanky it wouldn't be a big problem. It can get a bit weird trying to get the correct scenes to start....still have to sort that out. Would be nice if Live had a 'super-sync' between different machines running Live so that if you selected scene 2 on the one machine it would start scene 2 on the other(s). If they did the sync over ethernet they could run a much faster clock ( sort of like MOTUs 128word clock)....

I have two older MOTU Midi Timepiece AV(parallel port) that are sitting around...might try setting one of those as a Midi clock master..