Transport control and external sync

Hello Ardour forum.

I am trying to slave Ardour to an extenal MIDI clock source, Electribe 2. The E2 is continuously sending out MIDI clock messages, even when its playback is stopped. Routing the MIDI input from the E2 to Ardour MIDI Clock In, I can see the MIDI Clock messages via the MIDI Tracer. But when I enable the external positioning sync, the transport automatically starts running. And there is no way to control it via the Ardour interface. If I also route the MIDI input to MIDI Control In, then pausing the playback is possible after first starting the playback on the E2, followed by pausing/stopping it.

Is this thet expected behaviour? Isn’t it possible to simply have the BPM synced to the external source, while still controlling the transport internally (or at least not autostarting whenever a MIDI Clock message is received)?

I am working on this for Ardour 6.0, but right now, MIDI Clock is handled like all other external position synchronization sources - as a source of transport control.

It isn’t really clear to me what “the BPM synced to the external source” actually means, so if you want to expand on your own personal vision for this, it would be useful.

Thanks for the reply.

The way I have been using MIDI, is to slave several (hardware synth) devices to the E2. The devices all have their BPM set to the MIDI Clock pulse of the E2. All of the devices respond to transport control (start/stop), while some can be configured to ignore it. Some I send MIDI control messages to, and some MIDI notes to. Some I send only MIDI Clock to. I have been able to set up Ableton Live in the same way (though not used it much). I was expecting that Ardour would act in the same way when responding to MIDI Clock.

Hope this helps to clarify my vision of how I want to control my life using MIDI :slight_smile: