AR --> A4 Tempo floating

[Open_Mike]

Sample rates and bpm

tl;dr: If you don’t look at that jumpy number and just listen, it is probably sync’d tight. The BPM display on the Digitakt isn’t very smoothed. All MIDI sync followers are internally taking a jittery signal and smoothing it out. There is a trade-off in smoothness with how fast it can respond to actual tempo changes. Practically speaking, by ear alone you’d want the follower to be quicker and more responsive. But the visual display looks jumpy if you show that directly. So implementations ofte…

@t

Modern or more complex devices derive a tempo by averaging incoming MIDI clock signal and use that BPM value to set their internal clock source when syncing to an external clock signal. This way, they can continue to offer a higher resolution than 24 ppqn and continue to offer features such as swing even when they are synced to an external clock signal.

Another advantage of deriving the tempo by averaging the incoming clock signal is that jitter is much less a concern than it is with direct sync.

@t

As an aside, it should be noted that MIDI clock jitter is not very relevant for keeping most modern hardware boxes in sync. The reason for this is that pretty much all non-trivial hardware as well as all DAWs don’t use the MIDI Clock Messages directly to advance their internal sequencer, but instead average the timing of the incoming clock messages to derive a BPM value which they then use to set or update their internal clock, which is what drives their sequencer.