Ever since I packed up my Atari ST and bought a PC, I’ve had this nagging feeling that the midi on my PC/Mac/DAW has been sloppy. I packed up that Atari over 10 years ago, and I’ve owned many PCs and Macs since then, not to mention many different midi interfaces and external synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and sequencers. They ALL exhibited the same custard-like timing.

Seems like finally someone gives a shit. Check out Innerclock. They are a company specialising in getting rock solid clocks for synchronising your gear. The site can be a little waffley, but there’s some great information there, like just why timing matters.

In an nutshell, solid, reliable synchronisation of ANY piece of gear to your DAW via midi clock is pretty much impossible. There are too many other things that your computer needs to do at the same time for it ever to keep a reliable, stable clock. Innerclock seem to have come up with a nifty solution. It’s a small box called the Sync Lock. It works receiving audio pulses from your DAW’s soundcard and converting those to midi clock, dyn sync or voltage pulses and it does all this in less than 20 microseconds! Because the Sync Lock is driven via your audio card, which is sample accurate unlike your midi interface, the result should be sample accurate clocks! Bliss!

It sounds too tempting to pass up, so Innerclock have my order. Watch this space, I’ll report back soon.