Fair enough and best of luck with it
Could you explain how that works RĂ©mi? I canât 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.
Ahh, I see, hadnât realized it would be that simple. So itâs simply a (24PPQN?) trigger by audio instead of CV. Does it matter whether itâs 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 itâs 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, etcâŠ
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, itâs discontinued though. Thereâs also another project called Blackhole which is aimed at a replacement but I didnât try it yet.
I installed with:
brew cask install soundflowerbed
on my Mac (Sierra) and it works great. But yeah, Blackhole is âsupposed to be the futureâ⊠itâs in pretty early stages though, as far as I understand, so donât know if itâs quite production ready yet.
Thanks for the explanation RĂ©mi, itâs starting to make sense. I can see that you still need to do some latency compensation, but thatâs unavoidable I guess. So, from your explanation, Iâm guessing that pulse.wav simply contains a single cycle of a square wave pulse, and the PPQN is determined by how often itâs 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, itâs just about starting VCV rack a little earlier than Ableton, as the clock pulse will be sent to the Audio out after Liveâs processing, and then VCV has still to do its processing. So it doesnât 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 itâs more than that )
Great! I see it for VCV Rack, but I guess Iâm 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 canât see how I could use âaudio pulse syncâ with it, or other keyboards/synths for that matter. How do you use this technique to sync Ableton with other hardware, because youâre 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
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 thereâs always a bit of jitter involved, but it really depends on the synth⊠Some do sync really OK, some so bad itâs nearly non usableâŠ
Iâm 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 itâs already on the market, and itâs probably expensive
Expert Sleepers does this apparently, @stoermelder could tell you more about it as heâs the one who showed it to me
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
Yeah. Sadly this all requires having a Eurorack But I might be heading that way anywayâŠ
Does anyone know, if any of the DC-coupled audio interfaces, that also has MIDI (MOTU, âŠ) has any smarts in them, that can convert audio-pulse<->MIDI clock?