posted 25 March 2010 20:37            

Neither Ableton nor Kyma can be MTC master. So choices are...

Choices

#1 Use a hardware midi interface like MOTU Timepiece, Micro Express etc that can generate MTC. This requires probably a midi cable to your midi in on pacarana's or capy's audio interface. You could also use PacaMidi to help route there.
(Contact Douglas at Delora Software) MTC not working currently but fix is on the way.

#2 Use software. I used Backline by AudioFile engineering. It is cheap and very simple but it works and has other nice tools in it. Also has a trial.
This is the option I used.

Open Backline and open tool "Midi Time Code"
Set location to 0:00:00:00 this is just where it will start counting.
I used 30fps frame rate

For outputs we need to send MTC to BOTH Live and Kyma.

For Live I just route to any IAC port on the Mac (Create one in AudioMidi prefs if needed).

For Kyma the easiest for me was to choose the "paca(rana)" virtual midi port that both Delorasoft's vM2 or PacaMidi provide (However this does not work until a 1.1 fix is provided). Contact Delorasoft for the fixed version if you want to try. I have it and it works great. The other option is to use Osculator which does work as well with MTC. I'm not providing steps for that but basically, send the MTC output to Osculator's midi port and forward it to Kyma via OSC.

In Live, go to midi prefs and set the input IAC port you are sending MTC to to "sync", then expand the arrow next to the input port. Switch to Midi Time Code and set an offset or something like 4 secs 0:00:04:00. We will use same offset in Kyma. Set frame rate to 30fps, leave latency at 0ms.

Go into Kyma, in Timeline, where it says "Bars Beats" up top, switch to "Time Code" "30fps". Click and hold the "30fps" dropdown and at the bottom it says, "Set time code offset", choose this and set to 0:00:04:00. So basically it will take 4 secs before Kyma will start after starting the clock, same with Live.

In the left column in Timeline, where is says "Free Running", change to "Time code: MIDI or SMPTE", this actually is what makes Kyma sync to MTC. The other options were just for the grid display. You can switch them back to "Bars / Beats' if you wish.

Drag a sound into Kyma. One cool one is "AutoBreakz" from the wiki. You need to make sure timeline and Ableton are set to same BPM. MTC does not dictate BPM.

Expand the sound out say 300 bars.

Kyma needs to be playing to accept MTC. So I usually hit "Control-Space" to accomplish this.

In Live, you need to click the "EXT" box at the far upper left of main window to left of BPM.

At this point, both Live and Kyma are slaved to backlines clock.

Start Backline's clock and you are synced.

For AutoBreakz, try routing audio from Live to Kyma and process it with the replaceable input. Now you can mangle drum loops and other stuff in sync.

I love this on pads actually, very cool glitchy.

[edit] Just found out that Numerology can be an MTC master clock. Now that is going to be really sweet for my uses since I can sync Numerology, Live and Kyma easily. Numerology sends to 2 MTC destinations.

[This message has been edited by bar|none (edited 25 March 2010).]