Syncing beat clock in Mainstage on two computers
Apr 29th, 2012, 04:48
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
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