Midi clock renoise-vcv rack

Fair enough and best of luck with it :slight_smile:

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Could you explain how that works RĂ©mi? I can’t mentally bridge an audio pulse and the Clocked module. What modules and connections are involved? Thanks!

Just send the audio pulse to Clocked. There is no difference in CV and audio, a CV trigger is nothing else than a short pulse.

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Ahh, I see, hadn’t realized it would be that simple. So it’s simply a (24PPQN?) trigger by audio instead of CV. Does it matter whether it’s uni or bi-polar, 5V/10V? So this is simply exploiting the sender stack (and receiver?) prioritizing audio higher than MIDI clock and thus getting less jitter and drops?

As long as its above 1v / 2v it should not matter

Yes it’s as simple as that.

To explain a bit more my setup, I use ableton live and have a MIDI track containing a sampler with the Pulse.wav sample. I send it to a Soundflower out (which is a virtual audio loop on OSX), with a negative delay on the track. This delay is used to compensate VCV latency so Ableton and VCV are perfectly in sync. Finally, from VCV I route my Audio IN to the clocked BPM input, and adjust the PPQN setting to whichever is my MIDI pulse pattern in Ableton.

And If you want to get funky you can also add more tracks to send trigs for Reset, pattern changes, etc
 :wink:

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Can you say how much channels Soundflowers is support, up to 64 I hope?) And btw any similar solutions on audio routing on mac (paid or free)?

Yes 64 channels. Soundflower is Mac-only and free, it’s discontinued though. There’s also another project called Blackhole which is aimed at a replacement but I didn’t try it yet.

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I installed with:

brew cask install soundflowerbed

on my Mac (Sierra) and it works great. But yeah, Blackhole is “supposed to be the future”
 it’s in pretty early stages though, as far as I understand, so don’t know if it’s quite production ready yet.

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Thanks for the explanation RĂ©mi, it’s starting to make sense. I can see that you still need to do some latency compensation, but that’s unavoidable I guess. So, from your explanation, I’m guessing that pulse.wav simply contains a single cycle of a square wave pulse, and the PPQN is determined by how often it’s looped/fired by the MIDI track, correct?

This technique will work with software-to-software, but can it also be made to work between software-hardware-software, that works with MIDI clock/sync? For example, can this technique be used to sync an Ableton Keystep perfectly with VCV Rack, and how?

Yes you got it. About the offset, it’s just about starting VCV rack a little earlier than Ableton, as the clock pulse will be sent to the Audio out after Live’s processing, and then VCV has still to do its processing. So it doesn’t add latency as per se, it just starts VCV a little earlier so both finish processing at the same time.

In this scenario I use Live as my master clock, and send Midi Sync / audio Sync from ableton to external hardware. I just treat VCV as another bit of hardware (even if it’s more than that :slightly_smiling_face: )

Great! I see it for VCV Rack, but I guess I’m not quite seing how that audio pulse can be used to sync other hardware. Something like e.g. the Keystep has MIDI sync built in, but I can’t see how I could use “audio pulse sync” with it, or other keyboards/synths for that matter. How do you use this technique to sync Ableton with other hardware, because you’re bypassing MIDI entirely, right?

No i use midi sync for most of my hardware, only audio pulse when hardware supports it, like the 0coast for example

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Ah, Ok. So with most of your hardware you still have the MIDI clock sync/drop/jitter issues, because of these limitations with MIDI clock?

Yes there’s always a bit of jitter involved, but it really depends on the synth
 Some do sync really OK, some so bad it’s nearly non usable


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I’m seing before my inner eye a little hardware box, that has audio and MIDI in and out, and can act as a bridge between audio based and MIDI based clocks. Of course, if a noob like me can imagine that it probably means it’s already on the market, and it’s probably expensive :slight_smile:

Expert Sleepers does this apparently, @stoermelder could tell you more about it as he’s the one who showed it to me :wink:

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Yes, I can see that. Since the ES-8 and 9 are DC coupled audio interfaces, everything can be synced modular<->computer through audio.

Yes, It also have an expander ES-5 that converts Audio into MIDI, for apparently greater accuracy when controlling midi hardware

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Yeah. Sadly this all requires having a Eurorack :frowning: But I might be heading that way anyway
 :smile: Does anyone know, if any of the DC-coupled audio interfaces, that also has MIDI (MOTU, 
) has any smarts in them, that can convert audio-pulse<->MIDI clock?