Thanks for the post,
I had that experience too.
I spent many hours with MIDI Clock and often had problems with the devices going out of time after a certain amount of time.
Unfortunately, since Steinberg has been releasing new versions without a link for several years now and never comments on the matter, I’ve now switched 90% to Ableton Live and won’t buy any more upgrades for Cubase as long as there’s no link.
I almost exclusively use Cubase for mixing; it’s simply better in that respect.
I also have a Mac mini that I take to the studio and use to route audio from it to the main computer with Cubase via the “Blue Cat’s Connector” mentioned in this thread.
Now, of course, it would be great if I could “link” both computers!
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It’s here ! Finally :))
Sorry guys for the late… I know what it is to hear “it’s coming tomorrow” and then taking much longer to actually happen !
I have been myself expecting it to come out sooner, running after the developper and repeating his words about when that plugin would be available.
But, now, it’s alive !
Here are some details about it :
- Definitely not a steinberg related developper, he is doing his own thing.
- Plugin works on Mac and PC, has 3 weeks full demo mode.
- Put it on the master as an insert in Cubase (or any other DAW actually), open Live or other Link compatible softwares and they will pick the plugin link data. (recommended to put it as the last plugin of the master chain due to latency compensation)
- Of course Cubase wont’ be able to slave to this ! BPM changes made on Ableton won’t affect Cubase. You can’t control the transport from Ableton, but you can control the transport from Cubase (basically play/stop and keep the 4/4 bar sync) if you activate that option in Live settings.
- Experiences here with all the beta versions have been really good. Ableton react very well to it. You have to be aware that it’s a workaround using Link, and that delay compensation in the chain will affect the Link offset. You have an offset setting on the plugin for that purpose. My experience is that Ableton corrects the Link offset very well to keep the two in sync, no matter what VST you use in the project and how much they add in the overall latency! But you will experience sync going off when adding plugins in Cubase, depending where they are in the chain and depending the overall latency of the project in Cubase. You have to fiddle around the offset value accordingly. But again, my experience has been really good compared to any sync option available to this day since Rewire is gone. Once the right offset setting is found and you don’t have changes in the Cubase overall latency, it seems super accurate, stable on a long run, and reacts very well on the play/stop action.
- When it comes to Audio routings, you have to find your own way to sort this out. There are quite a few options for that but will also depend on your setup and how you want to use the different softwares together. My setup is with RME Asio, I can use the 2 softwares with the same Asio driver, Ableton has one dedicated output that is looped back into an input of Cubase through RME internal mixer. You can use tools like bluecat connector to do something similar, or Jack..etc
This is what I can tell for now… It was my own little dream for years to have this tool for my setup, because I really enjoy doing things in Ableton while holding the main project session in Cubase. I was stuck with older versions to have Rewire available for that purpose. Now I can enjoy Live with full VST, controllers, M4L abilities without restrictions and upgrade to newer versions of both cubase and ableton!
Enjoy !
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yeeees
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This is great! Thanks for the heads up! 
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Great news! 
I’ll give it a try!
Steinberg should hire this developer and then integrate Ableton Link directly into Cubase so it works exactly as intended!
Congratulations. I hope you’re doing fine with the plugin.
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The developer is a cubase user also and as he said, it might be a fundamental restriction in the coding / core of cubase that doesn’t allow Link to be implemented easily. I don’t know but it’s funny that it’s available in Cubasis..
My biggest disappointment here is the lack of communication from Steinberg team to its users on its own forum/platform. If they can do something or not about it, we would like to know more about the software that many of us use, and many of us use professionally. I’m using many other software/hardware tools, and there is such a consistent user support compared to here.
6 years of bumping this topic up, 100+ messages, 13k+ views… that should have attracted a little bit of attention to the customers service to come here for a few words… that would have been appreciated !
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There is a new plugin from Bom Shanka Machines that links in one direction for a reasonable price - pretty sure the developer uses Cubase. I haven’t tried it, but I own a few other things and like them.
Awesome!! I kind of managed with the blue cat connector and the IAC driver, but it has a lot of jitter.. can’t wait to try this!!
Nice !!
I will try that to
I usually get on fine with IAC driver on mac (and routing Ableton audio into Cubase over my audio interface, so via analog I get basically no latency). But this plugin seems cool and may be handy for more complex sessions. It’s 50% off until April 20th so I went ahead and picked it up just to have in my toolkit. Thanks for sharing!
I don’t understand that either.
Even very small one-man companies like “A Tasty Pixel” (Michael Tyson) are much better in this regard -(-> , Discord and https://roadmap.loopypro.com/ ).
However, I’ve actually had rather good experiences with direct Steinberg support so far.
Hey Jonathan - Curiously, have you been testing this out? I’ve been a bit confused by the entire thread as I too use virtual UAD for audio (or BlueCat, depending on what I’m doing) and just sync Ableton to Cubase and it’s been working without issue. I’m always looking for workflow improvements and just seeing if you’ve had an “aha” moment with this product.
Thanks.
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Hi, I was also somewhat confused since I have the exact same setup, using my audio interface (UA) and routing it over to Cubase that way, using also virtual midi ports to sync them.
I did test it a handful of times, but not extensively nor on a project. I would just say that the setup was a little easier than the virtual midi sync method but I can’t say from my light testing it solved anything big.
One thing of note, not sure if it was my setup, but before with the midi sync using Cubase as the Master and Ableton the Slave, I could only control the transport using Cubase. Maybe there is a way to fix this but I wasn’t sure. Using this plugin, I did notice that either app could control the transport, so if I was adding things in Ableton and pressed play, it would roll the transport, which is nice since before I always had to tab back to Cubase to hear it together.
It’s funny how we’re doing the exact same thing - I don’t use bidirectional, but wanted to in order to sync clip launch with recording. I think we just configure the transport synchronization to also look at Ableton as the source by activating the external sync in sources, but wasn’t sure if that would mess up my timecode sync or not - I ended up down a Blue Cat rabbit hole seeing if the Midi Remote would work with Connect on two different systems and never got back to that part.
The app doing both would be cool, though not sure it’s “buy a new app” cool 
If there was automatic latency compensation then that would be something, but nothing I’m doing is an issue anyway. Let me see if I can get bidirectional transport sync working on the same IAC virtual midi without mucking up timecode…
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