That syncing feeling

In order to be able to work up sketches for ‘Perang Gagal’ at ICLC in Limerick, I wanted to use Logic to compose demos of the material for the live players that I could then improvise with in SuperCollider. This poses the problem of how to sync the pulse and tempo between the two programmes, which proved annoyingly difficult to accomplish!

Ideally, I would have liked to set the tempo in SuperCollider for Logic to follow. A straightforward way to do this would have been for SC to send MIDI clock and have Logic follow but, annoyingly, Logic does not support slaving to MIDI clock.

According to the Logic help, it should be possible to sync to an audio click from Logic. I couldn’t get this to work, and nobody on the Logic Users Group seemed to be able to help either.

The eventual solution was less than perfect. I used Logic to send MIDI clock, and had SuperCollider slave to that. This involved using the MIDISyncClock extension from H. James Harkins ddwMIDI quark. Not perfect, but got the job done.

What did work very well indeed was the recently released Blackhole tool for passing audio between mac applications. I’d definitely recommend this as a replacement for Soundflower!