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Ableton Live 11 - anyone tried it with Synfire?

Posted

Just noticed Ableton have dropped rewire support from Live 11. Has anyone upgraded to Live 11 and used it with Synfire, how did it go?

ReWire

ReWire has been deactivated in Live 11. The developer, Reason Studios, ended support for ReWire in 2020.

If their (Ableton) statement is true, will this prove an issue for synfire's support of other DAWs going forward?

 


Sun, 2021-02-28 - 18:33 Permalink

It's indeed an issue. Live 11 doesn't work with Synfire Transport anymore.

It's a real mess. Logic X is still fine, as are most other DAWs. But sooner or later, we need to hack something for every individual DAW out there in order to get a Transport sync. Ableton Link doesn't work well for this, unfortunately.

Sun, 2021-02-28 - 19:02 Permalink

Wonder why they, Reason, dropped their support but didnt open source the code as I thought they pretty much gave it away for developers to use anyway. I know that might not be enough for the likes of Ableton to add support for it but might have an influence on other DAWs yet to remove its functionality. Surprised ableton link isnt good enough for what you need, although understand this would be an ableton only solution only. Will be interesting to see what happens with the other DAWs when they start releasing new versions.
Guess using loopbe would still work but without the tight integration rewire provided?

 

Sun, 2021-02-28 - 19:21 Permalink

Abbleton Link might work with Live. I've had a look into it and thought it was very well desiged. But too many DAWs lack support. That might change.

Transport merely needs

  1. Set tempo
  2. Locate to any position
  3. Start
  4. Stop / Pause

I'm confident we will eventually get this done. If everything fails, probably a hack might do the trick that pushes keyboard shortcuts into the DAWs buffers, or something dirty like that ;-)

The issue is time. We're in the middle of 2.0 and going down this rabbit hole right now is an unwelcome distraction.

 

Mon, 2021-03-01 - 09:11 Permalink

MIDI Time Code (MTC) works as well. Just checked. 

  1. Disable ReWire Transport in Synfire
  2. Enable MTC sync for a MIDI loopback port in Live
  3. On the External tab, send MTC to the loopback port

Make sure both FPS settings are equal. If you experience dropouts, increas the Render Ahead setting.

Wed, 2021-03-17 - 20:36 Permalink

Update:

I checked several alternatives to ReWire over the past few days (OSC, MCU, Ableton Link, etc). None of the protocols support all commands we need (Locate, Tempo, Start, Stop). I expected these commands to be absolutely trivial and was very surprised to learn I was already asking too much.

MTC and MIDI Clock support all commands except setting Tempo. The clock generator was already much improved for 2.0 (better timing). If a hack with OSC will be too fiddly to setup, tempo will have to be set manually in the DAW. Not ideal, but workable.

On a side note, this studio networking stuff is pretty time consuming and frustrating patchwork. You would think in the year 2021 A.D. there would be something more sophisticated, but it all still feels like 1980.