synchronizing transport across a LAN

Adam Murray's icon

I want to have a few computers running Max patches on a LAN and synchronize timing with the transport system. One computer will be the master transport.

I was thinking every beat or half/quarter beat I can broadcast the current bars/beats/ticks to all other computers using [mxj net.maxhole]. Anyone have any success/failures with this approach? What kind of latency am I going to be dealing with? Probably I need to worry about a wired vs. wireless LAN.

What if I want to use timepoints on the remote machines? I can't guarantee the bars/beats/ticks broadcast message will arrive in a timely fashion or even guarantee that it will arrive at all, but on a LAN it should be ok, right?

I wonder if it's best to have each computer run it's own transport so it won't miss timepoints, but synchronize with the broadcasted time whenever it is received. Even then, drift and errors may occur and I'm not sure how to deal with it. I guess I will just have to try and see.

Any tips, suggestions, success stories, etc?

Thanks in advance.

Just Phil's icon

i'm interested in the solution to this as i have a similar problem.

robotic-audio's icon

I'd like the transport to be able to sync to a clicktrack, like the sync~ object does !

This is by far the best way to sync between computers in max,- everything else is quite jittery. Audiorate !

And it's easy, just one audiocable from comp to comp...

Wetterberg's icon
kjg's icon

Quote: spleef wrote on Sat, 25 October 2008 20:03
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> This is by far the best way to sync between computers in max,- everything else is quite jittery. Audiorate !
>
> And it's easy, just one audiocable from comp to comp...
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if you go this route, you might want to compensate for the i/o buffers and converter latencies, from comp to comp.