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Re: max/msp experts - midi clock smoother?

Sorry I've been away.  First of all, this is the first time in five years I've heard reports of the Mobius
master clock being "flakey".  That isn't to say that you're not experiencing tempo drift but if you are
it is a relatively unusual situation.  From what I've read, you are most likely experiencing a bug in Ableton
Live which is flat out broken when it comes to syncing to MIDI clocks.  What happens is you record
a loop in Mobius that is say 120.4 BPM, Live receives this but for unknown reasons when it conveys
this tempo to the other plugins it "rounds" it down to 120.  Oz has a good description of this phenomena
here:


Scroll down to "Rounded tempos (for live)" under the "Preferences" section.

The problem with any sort of tempo rounding strategy is that the rounded tempo
won't actually match the length of the loop, so unless you make an adjustment to the loop the effects
will still go out of sync.  The only way for the loop to match the desired
rounded tempo is to change the length of the loop.  Augustus seems to do this by making the recording
go on a bit longer after you press the button to end it.  Depending on your style of looping this
can result in an audible timing discontinuity, especially if what you're looping has a strong rhythmic 
feel. Basically what can happen is that the downbeat at the start of the loop will sound late.  

This doesn't seem to be as much of a problem syncing with Live audio clips, I know people have done that
before so for mysterious reasons Live seems able to time stretch its clips to match an exact tempo, 
just not convey the right tempo to other plugins.

I don't know if this is happening, but also note that Live also known to not track changes in tempo well.
So if you started a loop in 120, then used 1/2 Speed to drop it for 60, it is quite likely that Live will
get lost and stop following MIDI clock.  For Mobius this means that once you've established a tempo
in the master track, you have to leave it alone for the duration of the performance, no Speed, RateShift, 
Unrounded Multiply, Unrounded Insert, or anything else that would change the length of the loop
and thereby the tempo.

If you're sure none of this applies to your environment, then send me an email and I'll try to figure
out what's going on.

Jeff







On Apr 3, 2011, at 10:47 AM, Simeon Harris wrote:

has anybody made a midi clock smoother in max/masp?


and was wondering if it could perhaps be tweaked to take input from the iac bus...average... the midi clock and pass it out to perhaps another iac bus port?

i'm trying to get mobius working in ableton as the sync master, but the clock is so flaky, i can't use any synced 3rd party plugins (they glitch horribly as the clock changes tempo)

sim