Digitakt pattern start inconsistent when slaved to DAW

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hi all! I apologize if I’ve missed someone asking this but I haven’t found an answer to my particular question.

I’ve found that, in both Bitwig and Reaper, whether or not the Digitakt starts playback on time when I hit play in my DAW is nearly random. In Bitwig, I can hit stop on the Digitakt after stopping Bitwig and usually the Digitakt will start in sync with Bitwig afterwards. I have absolutely no idea how to achieve consistent behavior in Reaper.

To be clear, I’m not talking about pattern changes via program change messages, although the behavior of those is also frustrating. Just starting playback when I start playback in my DAW, which seems like it should be really simple and reliable.

I’m using Overbridge but I found this to be the case without OB, too. Is there some step in the ritual that I’m missing? Do different DAWs somehow send transport signals differently? Does the Digitakt start and stop more reliably when slaved to hardware sequencers?

I’d love to hear any suggestions. I’ve resorted to just bouncing loops to audio really quickly as a workaround, which is frustrating but gets the job done. Thanks in advance.

#2

I don’t know for other DAWs, but for me I use OB mode, USB for midi, and the DT VST to sync in FL Studio. I do NOT enable sync in the midi configuration menu on the DT hardware.

In the upper right of the VST you can set sync between no sync, clock + transport, and clock.

Best regards,

Gino

#3

Thanks for the reply! Disabling that setting on the DT doesn’t seem to change anything. I was only using the Clock+Transport sync in the OB plugin, Bitwig wasn’t sending it clock/transport over MIDI.

That said, I’ve noticed that disabling sync in the OB plugin and enabling it over MIDI gives me different-but-still-wrong behavior where it starts pattern playback but doesn’t sound the first note, as other users described in this thread.

So I guess the behavior I initially described is a bug in OB (maybe just with Bitwig?) and the latter is a longstanding bug when the Digitakt is slaved to anything over MIDI. This really feels like the sort of thing that should just work with a device like this. Oh well.