Synchronization again…
“I’m using Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 with an ADAT XT, a Midisport interface, and a JLCooper Data 2 Sync box. When I sync the units using midi only data, everything works fine, but when I try to sync the units with some audio recorded into Cakewalk, the clocks never totally or exactly lock up. What gives?”
Syncing a MIDI/Audio sequencer to a tape machine has never been that easy to do without special synchronization equipment that can control the sample rate in the sequencer’s audio. Software is getting better and better at emulating this equipment, but as you can see it still has a ways to go.
The best way to get stable sync between a digital tape machine and computer audio is to use computer audio hardware that provides a way to lock to the word clock of the tape machine or vice versa. When you don’t lock the clocks together the computer has to continually look at the MTC (Which, keep in mind is not all that precise relative to digital audio at 44.1 kHz) coming from the tape machine and then perform a calculation to figure out how much to change the sample rate clock to keep the computer’s audio in Sync. Then it has to go about actually changing the sample rate in real time. While computers these days have the computational horsepower to pull it off, the software isn’t always foolproof. Things will get better over time, but the “real” way to do it is to always use hardware that can sync to external clock sources. This eliminates the messiest variables.