How to send midi clock from Hydrogen?

[mr_happy]

I have a pattern playing in Hydrogen and would like it to trigger a sequence on my Keystep connected to a soft synth.

In Hydrogen I have the midi preferences set as follows:

ss-20-13-44-2022-02-10.png (36.21 KiB) Viewed 1688 times

According to the Hydrogen docs: "Output: selects the device Hydrogen will send MIDI messages to. ". Midi channel 1 is selected on the Keystep and the dip switches are set to USB (because it's connected to PC via USB).

When I start the pattern in Hydrogen the sequence stored on the Keystep doesn't start.

I've tried connecting the Keystep to both AMSynth and Helm and both work fine. I can also start a sequence on the Keystep (with dip switches set to internal clock) and it plays either of the softsynths with no issues.

I've tried using Jack instead of Alsa but that doesn't seem to work either and seems to be introducing another layer of complexity!)

Any idea what I'm doing wrong or whether I've misunderstood and it just isn't possible to do this over USB?

[Natelok]

I think you've got it the wrong way around. Or at least, it's the beatstep that sends midi to hydrogen to trigger sounds. You do need to have both in and out midi connected. To get hydrogen to make it run, you'll need to set the clock on the beatstep to USB and make jack the clock source for all apps. That way you have a central clock so no matter which app sends play to jack, the clock starts.

I'm out but I can go into it more tomorrow if you're still struggling.

[mr_happy]

I think you've got it the wrong way around. Or at least, it's the beatstep that sends midi to hydrogen to trigger sounds. You do need to have both in and out midi connected. To get hydrogen to make it run, you'll need to set the clock on the beatstep to USB and make jack the clock source for all apps. That way you have a central clock so no matter which app sends play to jack, the clock starts.

I'm out but I can go into it more tomorrow if you're still struggling.

Thanks for the reply I don't mind which triggers starting as long as they're in sync. Making jack the clock source sounds right but how do I do that? I set jack as the driver in Hydrogen's preferences and start the server but Hydrogen doesn't appear in jack's 'connections' dialog and I can't see anywhere in either app to set the clock source.

[Natelok]

Sorry, I should have said. Jack needs a separate app to generate MTC timecodes. Try. https://github.com/x42/mtc-tools which is a command line clock generator for jack. Then start hydrogen.

Alternatively, you could use hydrogen as the clock source. Still need to set the beatstep to USB clock so that it knows where to look. And it has to be connect both midi in and out.

Do you use kxstudio repositories?

[Natelok]

Another article on sync with jack and a few other programs.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/ja ... inux-users

A thread here on LM about Timecodes

viewtopic.php?t=21164

[mr_happy]

Thanks for the detailed replies. I've read (some of) those links already but will give them a more detailed look.

I'd never heard of kxstudio... maybe I'll look into that too!