What would you do?

[rhythminmind]

Ok so hears my deal.. I Track drums while playing to sequences/arrangements/clicks on my laptop with Ableton/protools out of an MBox. The drums are being tracked to a standalone 16track recording DAW that i have rigged up for just tracking running reaper.(http://www.cockos.com/reaper/). My problem is my DAW is analog only and i cant sync the 2 systems to be running at the same samplerate. So with that i get drift over time when i import the drum tracks to mix. My Tracking DAW dosent have timecode capability's but can play back a midi track. I would love it if ableton on my laptop could slave to a midi or audio pulse. But i cant think of a way to rig that up..

 

So

No Midi timecode or clock

No Spdif or digital sync

 

But i have analog & midi i/o

 

HOW TO SYNC THE 2 SYSTEMS?

 

I think all i can do is use ableton on both systems with midi clock.. But i like reaper, very cpu friendly/stable for a tracking only rig. Ableton isnt the best thing for tracking 16 tracks of i/o at once..

[Kiwiburger]

Why are you trying to run two DAWs? Pick one and use it.

 

I guess you have struck the problem that that Protools doesn't play nicely with anyone else (not even themselves). So I guess you are a bit screwed trying to expand Protools. But Reaper, and most other DAWs can be expanded to as many inputs and outputs as you need.

 

If you must use Protools, why not export a mix of guidetrack/click into Reaper for when you are tracking drums.

 

The basic problem is that each DAW while use it's own word timeclock. Even if you use the same sample rate (e.g. 44.1kHz), the two clocks will be slightly different.

 

You could simply not attempt to synchronise them, and then manually import the wave files and if necessary time stretch them.

 

The professional solution would be to sync everything up with a master clock, but semipro gear doesn't usually offer that option.

[rhythminmind]

I use 2 rigs for a few reasons... I have a protools M-powered setup for mixing at home, A protools LE rig for my laptop, and a rehearsal studio that i have downtown for my live tracking.. I dont have unlimited cash flow but i do have 16 channels of ASIO i/o. So i'm a busy guy living in a very inconvenient city. I write my music at home/laptop and track the drums downtown. Now it's not a problem if i have a finished song that just needs drums. But i want to be able to make ideas on the fly from my laptop and track drums improv/real time. Thats when the sync is an issue. I'm not a rock band with set song ideas. I create my pieces and ideas then arrange them later. I'm a product of the DAW generation.

 

The only way i can think of doing this without digital i/o is to have an audio click coming from my tracking rig to my laptop and somehow find a piece of soft that can get BPM from an audio pulse..

[Kiwiburger]

Good luck with that. I understand Reaper is very flexible with it's syncing cababilites. A lot of DAWs aren't.

 

The basic problem is that digital audio requires a very stable clock at your sampling rate (44.1, 48, 96 etc). Close enough isn't good enough, because even two converters with stable clocks aren't going to be accurate enough - you will get clicks everytime they drift out of sync by a single sample. They have to share the same clock.

 

Of course you can forget digital and use your analog inputs, and sync them up by more primitive means (e.g midi clock). But only if your DAW software allows this.

 

Since Reaper is free, I don't see why you don't have it loaded on both your laptop and your tracking PC. You can still use Protools, but export and import using audio wave files. Some small time stretching might be necessary to compensate for any small differences between tempos.

 

For example - create a midi track in Protools at 120bpm. Export it as a wave file. Create a new 120bpm project in Reaper, import this wavefile. In theory the wave file should fit perfectly into the same number of bars, but in practive it might be out by a few samples, which would click. Using 'snap-to-grid' timestretching, stretch the audio so it fits perfectly with no clicks.

 

Use the guide track to track all your drums, and then if necessary repeat the process to get the wave files back into Protools.

 

I consider this a monumental waste of time - but it may be worth it if Protools has some plugins or features you really want to use. I would expect Reaper to sound better (64 bits internal audio).