Elektron Musical Instruments

Syncing to MIDI clock is very tough because all manufacturers
interpret the standard differently, and in order to sync to all the
different sequencers the MD/Mono need to be omniscient and make up for
all strange behaviours.

With Machinedrum OS1.19beta and Monomachine OS1.04 (due very soon) we
have verified the following setups to work well:

MD->Mono
Mono->MD
Cubase SX->Mono/MD
Logic->Mono/MD
MPC->Mono/MD
MONO/MD->MPC

The setups above have been tested with four different setups, Mac, PC
and different MIDI interfaces. However, no setup is like the other one
these days so someone will probably experience some kind of problem.

So, there _was_ an issue with syncing the Mono/MD to Cubase, but as
far as we know we have solved it in OS1.19. Please check and see what
you find. There is a bug in SX2 though when using loops which we have
reported to Steinberg.

We haven't tried with Live before, and when checking now I can confirm
that the Mono/MD syncs very badly to it. We will try look up why and
see if we can adjust something to the 1.20 official release.

Again, please do not pay atention to the tempo displayed in the tempo
box when the Mono/MD is synced to external clock. The tempo displayed
is a rough calculation of what tempo the incoming MIDI clocks
represent. This tempo is just for display though, the Mono/MD syncs
exactly on each incoming clock. It's like a chain, where each MIDI
clock is like a tooth on a cog-wheel. That's why the swing is
quantised when the Mono/MD is synced - it's quantised to the closest
MIDI clock. That's also why the Mono/MD freezes first when sync is
lost. The cog-wheel stops, and until the internal fallback timer makes
the Mono/MD resort to internal clock, everything is held.

Syncing correctly with MIDI clock is a tough business, but perhaps
with a scientific research with a report like the excellent
feature-request submitted before 1.19 we could make it happen in a few
more setups!

Daniel

PS. They say this is the warmest winter we've ever had in Sweden. =)

--- In elektron-users@yahoogroups.com, "Dieter Vandoren"
<theartistformerlyknownasvandoren@h...> wrote:
> Dan,
> Syncing is always an issue with MIDI hardware, but problems like
this are 
> pretty unusual for a modern thing like the MD. The least one would
except 
> from a complex/expensive machine like the MD is that it would sync
right...
> 
> Dieter