Will MTC / MMC work without a clock or MIDI interface?

Hi there…

I have Cubase on my main PC and I have a “print” MAC PRO with PTHD 11.

I am trying to figure out how to connect them using MTC or MMC, however, I just re-read the manual for both PT and Cubase Pro 8 and I can’t seem to find certain concrete info.

What I am trying to do is basically, hit play in Cubase and Pro Tools Starts, Hit Stop in Cubase and Pro Tools Stops, Scrub in Cubase and Pro Tools Scrubs, locked and frame / sample accurate.

Let me first say that I have NO Midi interface (other than LoopMIDI virtually) and I also have NO traditional word clock. Because I’m using the Focusrite REDNET 1, it has a proprietary clock, but not a traditional word clock and there is no MIDI. So with both PCI cards, I have an interface for both machines, but only one can be active at once, so essentially, it would be the Cubase machine, meaning that the Mac Pro would not have an audio interface active when I write.

So…

  1. If I use a product like ipMIDI or MIDIoverLAN, would that be all I need to make it work? Or Do I need to make sure both systems are connected using wordclock or another digital audio connection?

I’ve got it “barely” working where I hit play in Cubase and it starts in pro tools, but it is far from working properly. I am happy to tech it out, but I don’t have the time to experiment, if someone can tell me, it’s not going to work without a word clock or digital audio setup.

  1. The MMC master window… The way I have it synced right now, I can only use the transport on the MMC Master window, my main transport (also spoacebar and *) do not work or affect pro tools in any way. Only the MMC Master window which I don’t like using.

Anyway, thanks in advance!

I may be able to partly answer your question. I don’t have your setup but I’ve been looking into sync options to have Cubase on Win as Master and a slave machine over ethernet sync with it with a video player using MTC.

From what I can tell your Mac has rtpMIDI built in, so does my iPad which is how I tested this myself.

For the Windows side you can download an rtpMIDI driver from (free)
http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html

Using the rtpMIDI control panels at both ends you can setup virtual midi ports. I did the Windows machine first and my test slave machine discovered the midi ports automatically. I just needed to tell it to connect.

After that you setup MTC to transmit from Windows Cubase on the right virtual midi port and to receive on your Mac.

I had my Windows Cubase and iPad talking to each over MIDI doing this.

That’s fantastic Info!

Thank you! rtpMIDI is awesome! I’ve used loopMIDI before so I know Mr. Erichsen’s products are very nice.

I’ve got it close! Thanks