loopMIDI causing BPM fluctuating +/- 3-23BPM

loopMIDI causing BPM fluctuating +/- 3-23BPM

Hey guys, new to these forums and looking for some help. I’m trying to midi connect traktor with ableton and after linking the two, traktor begins to fluctuate back and forth anywhere between 3-23BPM. Any idea what could be causing this?

I tried LoopBe1 - LoopBe1 - A Free Virtual MIDI Driver and had similar issues.

Could it be my hardware? This is what I’m using at the moment as a station.

CPU : Intel i5 4690K @ 4.4GHz (OC’d)
Motherboard : ASUS Z97I-PLUS
Memory : Crucial Ballistix 1866MHz 2 x 4GB
Hard Drives : 1 x 250GB Samsung 840EVO & 1 x 1TB SATA
Video Card : MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming EDN. Twin Frozr IV 1.05GHZ 3GB
Power Supply : EVGA Supernova NEX750B 750W ATX Power Supply 80+ Bronze
Sound Card : Z971-Plus On-board || Behringer Xenyx 1204USB mixer

Hope there is something I can do to fix this. :disappointed: Any help is greatly appreciated!

sounds pretty odd… when im syncing to ableton or maschine (or midimasher) the biggest fluctuation i see is way less than 1bpm. havent tried syncing from windows but when i was running windows i used both loopbe and loopmidi for other purposes and they seemed pretty good.

all other traktor mappings are assigned to specific devices so no other midi is going over loopmidi apart from the clock ticks?

I would have traktor as the master and ableton as the slave but then even like that as you’re using windows, don’t expect to have much success, it will fluctuate.

i assumed he was synching ableton to traktors clock but maybe not :wink: i also use sync that way

Check out Mad Zach’s Sync’ing Secret:

MAD ZACH’S ON-THE-FLY SYNCING SECRET

Unfortunately, MIDI is an antiquated format and syncing MIDI clocks is not always a very reliable solution. To compensate and prepare for MIDI mishaps (mostly the two softwares getting off sync), I’ve built in a very convenient delay which I put on the Ableton bus (the track I have all my other tracks routed through). It’s essentially a simple delay set to free mode (not sync) with the dry/wet turned up to 100% and the feedback at 0%. I then have a knob assigned to the delay time, effectively creating a track delay (which is normally disabled when receiving external MIDI sync). This knob does the same thing that MIDI offset does in the preferences, but is much cleaner live and does not cause any system glitches.

thats pretty cool… shame i cant do something similar in maschine. so far once its synced to traktor its rock solid without any issues but i havent played out with it yet and some kind of fallback to fix any sync issues would be nice… resending a clock ‘start’ message from traktor doesnt seem to help as doesnt seem to be quantized. seems odd as seemed to work fine when synching my own midimashers sequencer…

There used to be a -MidiClockSlave=x option for Ableton to improve midi sync slave but I’m not sure if this option is good anymore.

https://www.ableton.com/en/help/article/sync-no-good/

I’ve always had problems with it as well. Problem with Ableton as a slave is that you can’t use your control vinyl with it. I’m sure I’ve bitched about this before.:rage:

Traktor doesn’t allow for more than one interface. I wanted to run the audio from traktor into ableton while keeping the the control vinyl because it would be cool to record/multitrack scratching samples and effects from Traktor. Theoretically, I would use soundflower/jackaudio ,or an aggregated osx device. But even if you’re using a Traktor certified interface through one of those options, it still will disable your vinyl control. I would end up playing it out of my Z2 then recording in through audio interface which the extra unnecessary conversion downgrades the quality.

End of rant

synching manually might be less hassle overall… hardly rocket science with the bpm written in traktor but i do like the idea of midi sync

What about syncing manually with you ears at the beginning of the set? Until it’s done, it’s done, no need to syncing again (unless you stop ableton or changing your tempo all the time. That will avoid some sync drops out who can run out of sync ableton from Traktor and put a weird and unexpected mess in you mix.
I do it with the tempo button of my push (and my APC 40 before ,the same way) as you would do with the pitch of an SL1200Mk2, by going up , down, up… until the sync is OK.