Dan;
oh, i know this, and we do both.
I was teasing a bit; the conducting thing is quite inovative, creative, and likely very conductive to expression.... but it's also quite funny to me.
until this year we had excellent success synchronizing the ensemble over the network; i've written about this elsewhere.
You wrote about dealing with a wireless network for musical sync? Do you have a link for that? That could be good to send to the NetClock list as well because more people had that issue. I think SLUB simply switched to using cables but then they are just 3 guys. It's probably more convenient to use cables when you have three friends than when you have a group of 30 students.
this year we've been exploring other ways of doing it that i find quite interesting, but we've also had some more difficulties with the network sync, in part (i think) because we've gotten larger; synchronizing 30 laptops seems to be harder than 15.
This makes perfect sense. I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple occasionally tweaked their implementation and likely they are more concerned with things like throughput for things like streamed video than with syncing up 30 performers. There are quite a few variables.
but even clock/timestamp syncing is not quite the same as the syncing we've done in the past, where a single server machine can say to all the other machines, do THIS, NOW. we've been able to do this in the past with 15 machines, and hopefully we'll be able to figure out a way to do it well (wirelessly) with >15. so, while i'm looking forward to having a good timestamp system of some sort, it will be one of several ways we go about "syncing."
I see. That indeed is different. NetClock is more about sharing a clock that sends pulses (or events in ChucK's case). From the user's perspective I think it would work like the clock I've been using when livecoding lately (I'll post it below to illustrate). That need not be a issue; maybe we can work at interoperability in the interest of cross-platform jamming. I'd also be happy to implement NetClock for ChucK myself. If I'd have access to timestamps I think I could do it entirely in ChucK itself. I hope nobody minds that I'm a bit fanatical about this but I've been very interested in synced livecoding jams since I realised the guy who has a radio show before mine uses SC and the one after me uses PD. Synced jam session would be nice for us; I'm purely being selfish here :¬). Then again it works on SC, Perl and Haskel now, I think, with Fluxus, Impromptu and PD in the works, somebody mentioned Processing as well. To me that's exciting; I don't like MIDI that much but I do like the convenience of MIDI clock and how it allows for jam sessions without having to first agree on some protocol. It's also interesting to me how all of these systems deal with time and timing in quite different ways so they will likely all abstract this shared clock in a different way towards the user; to me that's a beautifull thing. Yours, Kas.