IME this is definitely the case - the OT is very sensitive to external clock jitter, to the point that external clock isn’t useable at all with pickup machines. I’ve tested it with a high accuracy, dedicated clock source and a few hardware sequencers that are at least as stable as clock sent FROM the OT and it didn’t help, it seems to be inherent to the low resolution of the MIDI protocol itself.
The methods with conventional flex machines that people are describing are a better choice if they fit your workflow needs (I use both depending on what I’m doing), but with those if you turn off time stretch while using external clock you’ll hear pops and clicks at the loop point that aren’t there when you use the OT’s internal clock - the OT is responding to jitter in real time and it’s just enough to keep audio from looping smoothly without time stretch (the same thing can happen with slices).
I suspect that most dedicated loopers have some amount of averaging going on with external clock to avoid this, at the expense of sync not being quite as tight.
At any rate it seems to be one of those Octatrack things that you just ahve to kind of work with. Unfortunate but not enough to outweigh all the things the OT does well, and I still use at least one PUM in almost every project that’s meant for live performance.
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