How to Solve Ableton Live’s 1025 Measure Problem when Syncing Live Sets

Syncing your Ableton sessions with MIDI allows you stay in time across multiple computer. You can use a single ethernet cable or connect both computers to a network to make the connection.

This works perfectly fine until you have a large set that goes beyond 1024 measures. Because of a limitation with Song Position Pointer messages (SPP) in the MIDI spec, at M1024 your second Ableton machine starts over.

In this video, Ableton Live Certified Trainer Will Doggett, shows you two work arounds to keep your Ableton sessions in sync. Whether you’re trying to create a redundant rig, or sync your tracks to another session for automation, you’ll learn two solutions that will allow you to keep your sessions in sync, and you won’t have to deal with the 1024 measure issue.

P.S. Wondering why I didn’t mention Link in this tutorial? Link isn’t a great solution in a playback environment. While it provides simple and rock-solid sync, it doesn’t sync your measure location. In a future video I’ll compare methods of sync for Ableton Live and dive deeper into why I don’t suggest using Link for a Live playback situation.