Is your A4/AR/OT/MD/MnM also constantly sending MIDI clock even when transport is stopped? Mine is. It doesn’t matter a huge deal, but it can be problematic with some slaved gear in some types of setup. Is there an option for that in some menu that I haven’t found yet?
My MPC500 for example stops the clock output when transport is stopped. Is it just carelessness in the coding on the Elektron side or is there some intention behind why the clock won’t stop when transport is stopped? Which type of behaviour is considered standard by MIDI convention?
Lots of hardware works like this. It’s usually helpful for things like connected effects devices where you want the sync information even if the sequencer isn’t currently running. Sequencers, drum machines etc. rely on MIDI start/stop commands along with the clock so it isn’t an issue - or at least I’d be interested in a scenario where it is a problem.
I guess you’re right, I don’t own a whole lot of hardware. I can see an ongoing clock not being a problem in most cases, but I can hardly see it being helpful. If you want your clock to keep coming you can use pause instead of stop. But stopping the clock on a stop command kind of makes intuitive sense to me.
It can be problematic for example if you have a set that contains songs with and songs without the sequencer running and you have fx devices slaved like I do. In such a case you can’t switch back to the FXs internal clock for a song without sequencer because the external clock keeps coming in. Of course you could just mute all tracks on the sequencer and set it for a new tempo so there’s workarounds. As I said it’s not a huge problem. I was just curious why devices behave so differently.
I actually prefer this behavior. Some gear (Blofeld in my case) with tempo synced delays gets all weird when it stops getting clock and reverts back to whatever tempo it had been set to, and vice versa.
