Pickup machines - can't overdub while MIDI slaved?

If I understood correctly, after reading some forum post, pickup machines cannot overdub when the OT is slaved to an external clock. Is this correct, and why?

Suffice to say I was driving myself mad trying to overdub (constantly getting “overdub aborted” errors), read the forums, then tried with the OT not slaved, and bingo.

Yes - the OT PUM ‘record head’ needs to move with no deviation in rate, if the incoming midi clock fluctuates a bit it will follow the clock and therefore can’t write back or forward in time to where it ‘should’ be - it is clearly optimized around working for the internal clock (varying that would abort writing too - as would some LFO activity on buffer position etc

it’s possible to use when slaved, but really not reliably, external gear dependent

there’ll be lots of posts on this with other insights, it’s not something that seems likely that can be tweaked so some folk use flex machines to build up ‘loops’

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How? Mine just does not work at all. Every time I hit the record button, it says the overdub is aborted.

Yeah using flex machines records much better, but i would always at least need two tracks to overdub. Of course if I have to, I’ll do so, but would like to see what I am doing wrong, with the pickup machine, for it not to work at all in overdubbing when slaved.

maybe you’d ‘luck out’ with a steadier clock incoming, maybe only for a few passes - it’s never going to work out as a reliable workflow to have the OT follow with the PUMs - you might need the tempo to be already established - maybe i’m misrecalling because i wouldn’t even bother to try these days

So why not have OT be the master clock?

it’s not aborting mid overdub, it refuses to overdub at all.

Also an option if it has to be. In the current setup, this cannot be. The OT is not and cannot be my studio brain, it’s not up to the task. If I was to use it in a different way to play live, yeah, I can build it from the ground up thinking the OT must be master.

Fair enough.

Ive had nothing good to say about pickup machines, unless, the sequencer is not running, and the music I’m making does not involved any tempo synched elements, (so no clock required, or midi synch at all) In that scenario, pick up machines work brilliantly.

Track recorders and Flex machines are superior for tempo synched recording.

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I see what you mean, yeah then, it’s just like a regular looper pedal. The tempo sync is really what attracted me to this. Ideally, it seems like what I’d like is a mix of both ways of recording (flex and pickup).

Another OT quirk to work around. That’s fine.

How about only syncing start/stop from external gear, and not the clock?

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Been doing this for over a year, since I started heavily using pickup machines last summer. Works great. The OT internal clock is stable enough that I’ve had sessions over two hours long that were started on the DAW grid via MIDI but ran with the OT acting as master, and at the end everything is still perfectly in sync with the DAW timeline, so it should even work OK if you have a hybrid setup where the Octatrack needs to stay in sync with software.

EDIT: even with flex and static machines it’s better to avoid syncing the OT to external clock. IME external clock makes static and flex machines click with looping material.

It’s just always best to have the OT be the master whenever possible.

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