Comment by NewMountain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NewMountain | Hacker News Reader

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I recently did a gig with a quad cortex and honestly I couldn't shake the feeling of just wishing I could have all my Plugins (FabFilter, SoundToys, NAM and NeuralDSP mostly) instead. iPad, good interface, some bluetooth switch/expression pedal and all the same plugins I have at home would be amazing for me.

Just curious if anyone knows. Suppose a band of the future is just a few players who show up with iPads (guitar, bass, key/synth, drums) and, where relevant, a control surface (midi controller, edrums, etc). Does Logic have a "federated" mode? Can each iPad synchronize to a shared click track or other backing tracks for lights, etc or does the "brain" of a performance still need to be centralized?

Edit: I'm wondering if that "federated" functionality could be used to reduce the amount of gear required for a band using IEMs. That would be a _killer_ use case.

I'm super excited about this though and really looking forward to a major step forward at least in the guitar world.

While Logic doesn't feature this yet, the closest analog I know of is the Ableton Link protocol which allows users on a network to synchronize their master clock with other users across any app that supports it (Ableton, Pro Tools, Korg sequencers, etc).

While simple and meant more of a collaborative feature, this is a tremendously helpful feature that allows people to jump right in to a music-making session and ensure that their rig is going to be synced up with others in a musical meaningful way.

How does this handle latency of data transfer? I have worked with professional musicians and the delay of even 10ms across the stage annoys them.

I am trying to envision how syncing DAW's through the network could possibly avoid what easily amounts to more than 20ms of delay back and forth between devices.

Is this just not an issue for digital music production? It's a massive issue for live music and in-ear-monitors on stage.

Ableton Link only synchronizes the clock, transport, and BPM. No data.

It measures and accounts for latency between devices.

Well that’s frigging cool! Thanks for enlightening me!

I'm not claiming that it uses NTP, but:

> NTP can usually maintain time to within tens of milliseconds over the public Internet, and can achieve better than one millisecond accuracy in local area networks under ideal conditions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Clock_sy...

The algorithm is more sensitive to variance than latency, but over a LAN variance is usually pretty okay. Wifi can be a lot worse, though, especially if there are a lot of clients.

Well that’s cool, I definitely have some reading for today after the work day is over!

Thank you kindly!

Yes, latencies of 10 ms are noticeable for musicians. I feel like I can feel everything over 5-ish.

A fun fact is that that's why a symphony needs a conductor: one corner of the symphony to the other is 17-ish meters, which is 50 ms of latency. They have to lock in to a visual queue because at those distances, you can't synchronize on sound. It's also interesting to note that a symphony very literally sounds different on one side than the other, and not just in relative prominence: at march tempo (120 BPM), if you're sitting on one side of the symphony, some instruments may be a 32nd note ahead of the ones on the other side by the time they reach your ears.

This is a multi-studio live collaboration project which had a MIDI sync over the internet.

Amazing to see affordable connection speeds have risen to the point where this is possible.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FE1sY4OY1D4

Latency is the issue, not bandwidth, and the internet isn't fast enough for live instruments across it (unless the performers happen to be on the same local uplink). Even me pinging Google is 23 ms, where as most actual home users will be 50-200 ms from me.

Latency on a home fibre will be significantly lower than a 56k dial-up connection.

Somehow the artists could collaborate remotely using a shared MIDI clock. Admittedly it was techno which is both loopy and predictable, but still a cool achievement nonetheless.

I have home fiber. Again, I have 20 ms to Google. 40 ms (approximately what you'd expect from two not-physically-far-apart home fiber links) is already in the range that playing traditional instruments in sync is basically impossible. At a more typical 100 ms between nodes, that's a full 16th note of lag at common tempos. You can get up to 200+ ms between continents.

I know people that have also done it with techno, but they consider the lag as part of their unique sound. It's not something you can do with music in a general purpose sense.

For live performances you can do a lot of this stuff with AUM. It’s awesome for chaining plug-ins in novel ways. Has midi support as well. It’s the main way I use plugins on iPad.

The “federated” option you’re talking about sounds like it’s regular MIDI Sync with transport control. You hit play, everything plays in sync. Logic already supports this, you just have to wire things together.

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