The beautiful thing about the Internet is that as soon as one says anything (especially me in inSync) it is public and there is always someone else who will challenge it. Of course sometimes the minute things people take issue with are almost comical, but that’s another column. Today’s inSync references the inSync from last Thursday (5/13/99); the one about bringing SMPTE into an audio interface port and having a computer synchronize to it. We said there is currently no way for a computer to deal with this.
One inSync reader pointed out that there is a product that will do this (sort of). The Dakota card from Frontier Design will, with the right options, read SMPTE over a digital audio input and sync to it. This card does have some unique capabilities in that it has sync functions and audio I/O right on the one card. The computer is still not supplying any conduit for the time code and there are some scenarios where it just will not work, but suffice to say there is a way with this product to use time code at an audio input for synchronization. It’s actually a pretty clever idea. There may be more out there.