I’m interested to hear from any person who has a Multiclock running along with Cubase, successfully utilizing the (negative) track delay.
In my experience this doesn’t work at all when I use the Mutliclock VST plugin. Track delay at any setting simply has no effect. So please, tell me how to use the Multiclock properly in conjunction with Cubase! Any help is much appreciated.
Interesting little box. I just read parts of the manual. Not sure what you mean by “track delay”. Cubase has to be the master. Best is to use the audio jack to transmit the clock signal into the device.
What is your setup?
Since I’m a little lazy when it comes to typing, here are some quotes from the Multiclock manual:
"The former mode (NEG/POS) allows you to shift sync signals back and forth with respect to the masterclock. This implies one bar forerun before all slaves start when you initiate the master clock. The latter mode (POS) skips this one bar and starts everything as you hit play on the mas-
ter in exchange to allow only positive delays. There is a nice trick for some cases to circumvent this behaviour.
You can set machine mode on the multiclock to POS and keep the ability to perform negative shifts using Audio Sync if you are able to configure a negative track delay on the Plugin or Sync Track audio output on the DAW. Example: Set the track delay to -100 ms on the DAW and the shift range of the channels to +200 ms. The zero position in time on the multiclock is at +100 ms then and you can move back and forth from there."
The Multiclock gets it’s audio click from a dedicated VST plugin on an otherwise empty audio track. That track is what needs a negative track delay, as described in the MC manual. I doubt that Cubase can do that, since track delay appears to only have an effect on events (audio or MIDI), not the track itself. If that’s true, the Multiclock is worthless for me and I still am without a solution for my hardware latency issues. But - fingers crossed - there might be a way to get the Multiclock to work properly with Cubase, that I’m just not aware of.
It seems the compenstion of delays in order to keep everything in sync is so well done in Cubase that the plugins on the insert of a track with track delay get corrected so that, in the end, they are in sync with Cubase’s song position again.
Maybe you can use the NES mode instead and keep that one empty bar in your project?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Doesn’t seem logical to me. When I deliberately set a track delay, I expect it to actually happen. If it was compensated by the program, the whole feature would be plain useless. In my opinion, that would not be “well done”, but rather poorly implemented.
Multiclock in NEG/POS mode does not work for me, as not all of my devices get the clock via Multiclock. The devices that get the clock directly from the Midi interface or via Overbridge would start one bar too early if I’d use the empty bar approach. Also, when I start the playhead somehere in the project, other than at the very beginning, this empty bar wouldn’t be that empty anymore. A pretty annoying scenario during recording.
Isn’t there anyone out there, successfully using the highly praised Multiclock with Cubase?
Well, the track delay feature affects the events on the track only. It does not alter the song position for the track individually. Since you are not working with audio events but only with song position (and a clock signal derived from the position) nothing gets delayed.
Have you tried asking E-RM how they got it working with Cubase?
I use the Multiclock in Nuendo and it does work very well. There are three components to consider for the setup:
- The negative track delay, to monitor your external hardware without the need of a 1-bar pre-roll.
- The audio recording offset, to realign your recorded tracks.
- Routing the Multiclock signal, so that it also works while rendering your mix in real time.
If you are still exploring this, I can give you more detailed instructions.