Midi-clock generator

[Andrey Zots]

Can anyone suggest cheap and stable midi clock generator device? It should be hardware. The clock from PC is totally unreliable for our purposes.

thx in advance

[State Machine]

Well, knowing nothing about your setup, I could suggest that some MIDI controller keyboards generate MIDI clock. Also, do you have any hardware synthesizers at all? If so, for example, I use my Korg MS2000R as a master MIDI clock source and route this through my MIDI patchbay to other gear that act as slaves, and to my computer also. This gives me less deviation between "ticks".

If your like me, you have many older computers hanging around. In a bind, you can always use a spare computer, dust it off, and press it into service for the soul purpose of generating a master MIDI clock. Just run it in a bare minimum configuration to tighten the timing.

You may want to think about why the MIDI clock timing is so bad on your rig. To many background tasks? Running many plug-in's/Instruments? Your MIDI interface and drivers? Many things can hurt the performance of your computer.

Hope some advice helps ....
Bill

[blue hell]

Something like an old 386 machine with an MPU401 should be rock solid, or an old Atari, anything really from the time that interrupts were not virtualized yet ... or .. I once had this HD recorder, that one gave a good midi clock as well.

[paul e.]

i always say...use MTC instead of MIDI clock if you can..it works more reliably

[State Machine]

[State Machine]

[paul e.]

when using MTC to lock two sequencers, it has the added advantage of following the BPM with frame accuracy

further, if you are syncing two sequencers to bars/beats, MTC will lock the Song Position Pointer accurately

in this case, if i used MIDI Clock, i would have to 'hard start' the sequence at the beginning to send the 'start' command and get good lock-up..

there is no frame by frame ' watchdog' to ensure the MIDI Clock stays tight, like there is in MIDI Time Code

which is why you hear a lot of people talking abbout the BPM's wildy leaping up or down by 1 or 2 BPMS when using MIDI Clock


--

make the 'master' the MTC sender...and you can even set the same sequencer to also spit out Clock for drum machines etc that only have Clock..via the 'thru'

[paul e.]

btw..the above really only applies when you are using MIDI to trigger multiple internal sequences from machine to machine,

...which is what i assume the poster is trying to do

unless he is having more of a generic MIDI timing issue related to his PC, in which case perhaps your suggestion is the one to go with

[State Machine]

[Andrey Zots]

Thanks for answers.
At last we used old Korg ER-1 as a master MIDI-clock generator in our setup and it works just fine. Now the clock is really stable. I cant use MTC because our equipment dont support it. Also i dont understand why should we use it in techno music...

Still looking for something smaller then ER-1 because its a gig setup.

[State Machine]