Rather complicated set up I with a fellow musician and we have hit a wall. After reading the article on this forum about the setup the synth guy from The Kooks has, I was encouraged about syncing two sessions of mainstage. Unfortunately I think my setup is a bit more complicated. We are both running Mainstage on two MacBook pro's attempting to play together for live gigs.. I use a MIDI device with two outputs and trigger the beat clock in both of our sessions. This has been successful. The problem is the beat clocks don't start consistently perfectly in sync every time. Sometimes mine will be a bit ahead of his and sometimes his will be ahead of mine. A small amount of difference is fine but sometimes it is too much to use for performance. The reason this is so important is because we are both using loops and when the beat clocks are significantly off then the loops don't line up between our sessions. Things I have tried: 1. Adjusting the buffer size of the computers to better sync them. 2. Using only one session of Mainstage for our group and using a second monitor mirroring. Problem is ,we have way too many patches and midi buttons, and need more screen real estate than one session of mainstage can give us. 3. Creating an Adhoc network to sync the MIDI between computers. I have synced them as was able to start the beat clock on the slave computer from the main, but it had problems where I had to hit the space bar twice to start it on the slave computer. Plus there was still latency and not a perfect sync. I'm out of ideas at the moment but would love some input on how to break through this barrier. Seems like this forum is the right place for this problem. Any help is greatly appreciated. Cheers, Freerange

Hi Freerange, Have you made sure that Airport is disabled on both Macs? Airport can cause havoc with MIDI Sync issues. Have you also tried setting up a MIDI sync the way Rounik explains in this post: [url]http://www.macprovideo.com/forum/audio/ableton-live

You know, I guess I am more of a newbie than I thought. I am able to network the computers by creating a WIFI network. When I turn off WIFI I don't see that option and they are not finding each other. I will google on how to set up an ethernet network, I am sure I am missing something ridiculously simple. Once I do that I'll report back. Best

Am I just supposed to be able to plug a plain old ethernet cable from one computer to the other and voila the are connected? When I do plug the cable in, it still says "Ethernet not connected" in the network preferences window. And the audio MIDI set up doesn't find the other computers session in the directory. It seems I am not networking the computers via ethernet correctly. What simple step am I missing? FreeRange

Are both your Macs on a switch/router? If so, then you need to connect an ethernet cable from the switch/router to your Mac and they will pickup an IP address assigned by the switch/router. I see I didn't post Rounik's post correct. It is here: [url]http://www.macprovideo.com/mpvforum/audio/ableton-live/29306[/url] Follow this and see if this helps in getting the two Macs to see each other.

Hi Gary, Thanks for taking the time. I have followed these instructions from Rounik to the letter listed below and have been successful at getting the two computers to see each other in the AUDIO MIDI SETUP. Unfortunately each time I try to connect to the to the session listed from the other computer in the directory area in AUDIO MIDI SETUP I receive this message. "0.0.0.0:5004 didn't respond to the connection request. Check the address and port, and any firewall or router settings. (12:15:56)" For what it's worth I also tried this by creating a WIFI adhoc network and even though I seems to have done it successfully before with...latency issues, now I am getting the same error message listed above when I try to do it. Here were those steps I followed that you recommended. Any ideas on how to proceed next? "- Connect an ethernet cable to both Macs. - Turn off Airport. - On one Mac go to Audio MIDI Setup (in Applications/Utilities/) choose the MIDI window's 'Network'. - Click on the "+" to add a new session. - Enable it and give it a "Bonjour name" of your choice. - On the 2nd Mac go through the steps above but don't create a New Network, instead select the name given to the other network." Thanks, Freerange

Hey Gary, Haven't heard from you in a couple weeks. Do you have any ideas on this one? If not, how would I contact someone who knows? Seems like Rounik knows quite a bit about it, maybe I should copy this into a thread he is responding to? I am really stuck here. Thanks so much for your help.

Hi Freerange. Sorry I seemed to have missed your reply. Afraid I am not too sure where it may be going wrong. Take a look at David Earl's article here on syncing two Macs with Mainstage: [url]http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/mainstage/sending-external-beat-clock-from-mainstage[/url] He talks about Sending MIDI Clock, and Start and Stop messages. Maybe this will help.

I've read that article about 20 times trying to see what I missed. Unfortunately I am stumped. I initially had a different simpler solution to syncing beat clocks but it has proven inadequate and inaccurate. I used to simply run 2 midi cables out of 1 keyboard and connect them separately to the 2 MacBook pros. In identical mainstage sessions on both computers I then assigned the same button from the keyboard to trigger the midi beat clocks. When I hit the button, both beat clocks would start however they were never in perfect sync. I messed with the buffer size on both computers to try to get them to match but this did not seem to help. Every time I hit the play button to start both clocks it seemed to be random how much they would be off from each other. It wasn't consistent. I have scowered the Internet for a solution. I wonder if anyone at apple might know? Could be worth an AppleCare call unless you have any other ideas. We must have both computers perfectly in sync since we are running Ultrabeat in both Mainstage concerts, and when they are off even slightly it is obvious.

Hi Freerange, Sorry I am stumped as well. Wish I had some more tips for you to try. Has anyone else on the forums had experience with syncing two Macs using Mainstage?