For live performance I want to be able to sync two laptops playing in Renoise at the same BPM and playing the same lines. So for example the one laptop makes instrumental stuff, and the other one synths, basses and stuff…
Is it possible(?), if yes; what do I need & how do I do it?
If it isn’t possible in Renoise, could you explain how to do it in Ableton Live, and both Rewire’ing with Renoise?
Thanks in advance…
I have never done that, but here is what I would try first. In preferences-midi you have option for midi clock master and midi clock slave. So connect a midi cable between the computers and set up one as master and one as slave.
You can midi sync them together and this work great in renoise. You will need a midi in and out for your laptops. I’ve used usb midi controllers and had a midi cable linking them together.You make one laptop your slave and the other the master but clicking on the the midi clock button up on the top left corner of renoise.
I don’t believe Renoise yet responds to MMC (MIDI transport commands and the such) so you would have to start each laptop playing manually. Or is this something that has been addressed and I missed?
My brother figured it out to do it with a program (which i forgot the name from, will check again later) and a VST called Wormhole. So both computers were connected with each other over a wireless network, one being master and the other slave. Using the VST the master could say when to start playing. The only (big) problem was that it wasn’t completely synchronized, still not really noticeable.
We used a trial version of a program that we were only able to play 60 minutes with.
After that we tried some other stuff like nettomidi & miditonet (to be found somewhere on the renoise pages), but took most of our time getting both computers synced. Sometimes the bpm of the slave could get a life on it’s own, and jump from 100 to 400 and stuff.
So my idea; wireless is not a solution, because it’s not reliable at all and can sometimes take a lot of your time before you can start playing.
We want to do it with wires instead, so if anyone has advice which I need to get. If there is a possibility to do it with crossover cables that would be awesome. If you need to get external hardware, tell me which. Just hit me if you have experience with this! (:
You should be able to get the tempo perfectly sinced with just basic MIDI connection between the two, one as master, one as slave. It’s just the starting play at exactly the same time I’m not sure is possible (but the freedom to have both running separately could be quite nice.) This is again where the suggestion for nudging pattern and tempo could come in useful.