Syncing two Laptops

Hey guys...

Hope someone can help!

A friend of mine and me want to make music together and sync our Laptops.

One Laptop runs Ableton Live on Windows, the other one Reason on a Mac. We both use an AKAI MPD.

First we tried to sync via a Network session, like some tutorials in the internet tell us. It didn't work, though we managed to create a network session and both log in.

Then I bought a MIDI-cable to connect the MPDs we are using. One gets the signal from the other one, the MIDI-clock on that one is set to "External" to get it from the MIDI (that's all AKAI tells me) and I thought this should work. But it didn't.

Because we are using different plattforms and programs, the problem could be very hard to find. Maybe someone of you guys did this before and can help us out. Or tell us, how you are syncing two Laptops.

Thank you guys!

I haven't actually tried it, but I remember a while ago when wondering the same thing (using a second machine to offload CPU usage) I came across this thing - http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/rtpMIDI.html

I've done this with my old roommate, same situation, he was on Mac I was on PC. It was at his studio so we took a MIDI->USB cable from the out of his audio interface into a USB port on my machine (I didn't have an audio interface at the time). Be sure you also have Live set up to look for an external signal and be the slave .

You'll have to set up sync (maybe remote? fuck it's been a while) on whichever MIDI port/device your MPD is on:

Then, you'll also have to set Live to look for an external source by hitting EXT

If the little button to the right of EXT starts blinking after you hit Play on the Master machine then you've got it.

Well actually we exactly did what you described but it didn't work. Though you had a controller and a midi device and we had two controllers, right?

About the wireless midi clock, we used exactly the program you posted, and we even managed to connect to a session, but still, it didn't work.

this should be really easy dude!

midi doesn't care what platform you're running on, you could sync mac, pc, atari and amiga using midi, its all in the software configuration

one cable, (master)midi out ------> midi in(slave)

set master software to send midi sync/clock out its MPD, set slave software to recieve midi sync/clock from its MPD, hit play on master

also, reason doesn't (didn't, might do now?) generate midi sync, so you'll need to use ableton machine as master