LiveMTC to ProTools audio offset differs on each playback

Sync tools
1

Hi there, first off, thank you for this amazing tool! It is so helpful.

I have been testing the sync capabilities of Live MTC by recording a click from Ableton into Pro Tools, and I am happy to see that there is completely no drift of the audio. However, I have noticed that on each subsequent record pass, the offset of the incoming audio will be slightly more or less than that of the previous record pass. Should someone choose to use LiveMTC as an overdub tool, I would think that something like this will cause some phase issues. Is this something that is normal? It seems that no matter how much I adjust the offset in the LiveMTC Bridge app, I cannot consistently get my incoming click audio to land right on the beat. I would love to be able to record into Pro Tools without having to be wary of what could possibly start causing cancellation issues down the road in my mix.

All this being said, maybe I have done something wrong in the setup. Any suggestions would be very much welcome!

Thanks!

2

Hi, thanks for getting in touch!

As far as I am aware, unfortunately MTC is not suitable for providing audio-rate sync. This is inherent to the way it works; it doesn’t use a sample-accurate time representation but communicates time at the level of frames (a maximum accuracy of 1/30th second) via MIDI, which has a limited bandwidth.

This makes it much more suitable for synchronization of film than audio. You are likely to get phasing artifacts if you rely on MTC to align two (semi)identical audio clips.

But let us know if you can get another tool to provide that level of sync with MTC, if so we are happy to investigate if we can match that!

3

Hi Mattijs,
Thanks for your reply! This was as I suspected. However, it is still an incredibly useful tool for syncing to a pro tools system that runs video and also printing stems. Many thanks!