Receiving MIDI Clock / Collaboration with MIDI-sequencers

heyho,

i recently jammed with a fellow musician of mine and for the first time used to tidalycycles for this. great fun so far! i just noticed getting a stable midi clock going in between us two was a little difficult. his setup is quite midi-based: a bunch of drum-machines, an arturia sequencer/keyboard and an atari st running cubase for sequencing. I checked this article, but that is only for sending out the midi clock. in this setup receiving a midi clock would have been a little easier i think. would there be any way to do this? i've already searched for an midi/espgrid-bridge but haven't found anything yet. sadly ableton link isn't able to sync to a midi clock whilst sending out a link signal...

side note/update

in the end, we got up and running so that i would be able to SEND the midi clock... unfortunately, i had forgotten the help article at this point - and set up ableton to send the midi clock and a link signal that got to tidal via carabiner. as cpu load was increasing (streaming from the very same machine maybe wasn't the best idea :sweat_smile:), i had to alter the link-offset in tidal quite frequently in order to stay in sync.

has anybody here ever realised such a setup? (:

all the best,
moritz

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Could you describe how you got tidal to receive a midi clock?
I'm not familiar at all with carabiner.

There isn't a way for Tidal to receive midi clock currently, sadly. Here's info about link + carabiner: https://tidalcycles.org/index.php/Link_synchronisation

It would be better to have link support directly in Tidal, but that would involve making a Haskell module interfaces with the link C++ library, which is a bit beyond me unfortunately :confused: https://github.com/tidalcycles/Tidal/issues/660

Is this issue still in the same state?

Looks like recent progress has been made in the Link side of things: Link support · Issue #660 · tidalcycles/Tidal · GitHub

I'm not really finding a good Link-MIDI clock bridge anywhere in the wild (except for with iOS, which doesn't help me). With this latest experimental Link support is it possible to sync with a hardware synth over MIDI clock?

Hi @kindohm, I will soon produce documentation on the new Link support. I will then include instructions and code samples for interaction with MIDI devices. Link needs to be the source of truth for timing, so the setup should look like this:
Tidal <-[Link]->Supercollider-[MIDI clock]->MIDI device

No stable method exists for the other way around:
Tidal <-[Link]->Supercollider<-[MIDI clock]-MIDI device

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I've been looking out for bridges between link and other sync methods actually.. Like it would be great to have an app that could do tap tempo to control link, even better to have a tempo follower so that an instrumentalist like a drummer could set the tempo. I was surprised that even ableton live doesn't seem to help with this - it has a built-in beat tracker but you can't use it at the same time as link for some reason.
I saw that @hellocatfood was bridging from link to jack transport under linux which worked well.. What other ways of bridging are there?

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Ableton recommends Link above Midi Clock it seems.

Bipscript supports Midi Clock, Jack transport and Ableton Link (in development branch), maybe that could be useful.
http://www.bipscript.org/

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