Rewire and PreSonus Studio One

Hi there - I tried to send midi to Studio one, which works to hear the midi in Studio One VSTs.

But I have issues with the control. Tried also rewire, but then the midi in stops working in Studio One and start/stop/pos works only from SF2->S1.

For my tests I use LoopMidi and tried to use it also for control start/stop/position. But I can't get it work to control it. My goal is to start/stop/pos from Studio One and Synfire. I also enabled midi Sync in Synfire (version 2).

It looks like Synfire is sending something to control over my second loopback device. But Studio One does not start/stop.

Do you know how to enable bidirectional control over midi?

Going to chime in here because I'm also having issues with getting Studio One to sync with Synfire.

In order to get Studio One to sync with Synfire, you will have to go to Studio One>Options>Advanced>Synchronization. Here, click on "Sync to External Devices" and choose whichever port you are sending output to in the Synfire MIDI Sync tab. Set the Protocol to MIDI Time Code in Synfire.

Here is the issue I'm having: Studio One will not follow the song position in Synfire. If I start on bar 1 in Synfire and press play, Studio One will immediately jump to bar 1800 and play from there. If I hit the stop button in Synfire to reset, Synfire will return to the first bar, but Studio One will only return to bar 1801. If I hit the stop button twice in Studio One to return to the first bar again, as soon as I hit the play button in Synfire it will once again skip all the way to bar 1801. I've attempted to use several different configutaions in the Customize drop down in Synfire under Protocol. No matter which configuration I try, Studio One will alway jump to bar 1801.

When I used Studio One 5 this was not an issue as it used Rewire and it would sync perfectly (for the most part). But I just upgraded to Studio One 6 and it looks like Rewire is no longer available. So now I will have to use MIDI Sync. Is this a bug in Synfire? Or is this a Studio One issue? Can it be resolved?

Hi and thanks. I did what you said with SF2 and S1 version 5. I have to confirm the 1800 position thing.

Furthermore the effect is also, that SF2 can start/stop Studio One but if I press play in Studio One, nothing happens to SF2. I also tried to set my "LoopMIDI ctrl" device as input for SF2, but it has no effect.

I was concerned that something like this would happen with the latest Studio One update. But it's understandable that DAWs are now dropping ReWire since it's become essetnially an obsolete technology. Ableton Link is probably the next best thing. The issues here are: 1) Studio One doesn't have Ableton Link (yet). Presonus has received a lot of request for this feature and there was a lot of hope that it would be a part of this new update, but no such luck. And 2) even if Studio One had Ableton Link, it's my understanding that Link does not transmit playhead location data. So if you needed to skip to a certain part in your arrangement in Synfire, Studio One would not follow along.

Hopefully, Andre is able to enginer some kind of fix so that Studio One and Synfre can better cooperate with each other.

I thought you could only have 1 midi clock source and you have that set to synfire. If you press play in presonus i would have expected the play head not to move while it is waiting for a midi clock from synfire. Maybe there is some other setting in there that needs changing, or possibly it is presonus being very loose with their implementation of syncing with an external clock?

The jump to 1800 sounds like a bug. If no one else using midi sync is having that problem with other daws then i would suspect a bug in presonus.

I thought you could only have 1 midi clock source and you have that set to synfire.

I am a beginner in linking midi devices. So when I read "sync", it sounds for me like bidirectional. 

And I can't find in DAW or in SF2 a kind of "master" setting to define the role as clock-giver.

For me it is more essential the other way around. My tries came from the idea to merge the things, so I can later adjust and add more things in Synfire. The export midi per file workflow is not so useful here as it cuts flow like a point of no return.

So, is there a way to control Synfire by external midi signal, or is this in general not possible?

had a thought, might be worth tuning off the allow negative locators and adding a measure or two of global pre-roll just in case presonus cant handle negative positions and so jumps to 1800.

Sorry I dont know if you can sync synfire to the daw's midi clock/timecode.

The jump to 1800 sounds like a bug. If no one else using midi sync is having that problem with other daws then i would suspect a bug in presonus.

This is the most likely scenario. Unfortunately, as much as I love Studio One, Presonus is the worst when it comes to customer service. And now that it's been bought by a large corporation, I don't expect it to improve in that area anytime soon. It sucks that there doesn't exist an application or protocol to get DAWs and sequencers to talk to each other in a meaningful way. Linux has JACK, but there isn't anything like that on Windows that I'm aware of. In the end, I'll probaby have to downgrade my Studio One to the previous version so that I can use Rewire.

In the meanwhile, MIDI 2.0 looks promising. One of the most interesting features is bi-directional communication between devices and applications. Perhaps if this becomes the standard synchronization between Synfire and your favorite DAW becomes seemless. It would be nice to be able to control start/stop and playhead location from my DAW as well as Synfire rather than only being able to control these from Synfire.

To compensate for the lack of a complete sync protocol, we deliberately made it configurable. We will add more options to those menus as they come up and we might eventually have a preset for every DAW that "just works".

Ableton Link would be great, if it only had an option to locate the playhead. As it is now, it can only stream forward. What's nice though is that it can transmit tempo. So we might be able to add it to the configuration mix, if only to transmit tempo (which is currently impossible).

Sync is never bidirectional, btw. You need to decide which is the master transport and the other will follow. Otherwise there would be infinite feedbacks of all sorts. Synfire is required to the master transport.