Just to clarify, I was concerned about midi because I have read more than once that usb2 and real-time, accurate midi were not the best of friends.  Given my experience with the old MultiFaces drivers, I do know that RME can do some pretty great things with drivers but I just wanted to check on how real-time midi worked with Fireface and Babyface via usb2.

Oh, I had no idea about the ADAT sync.  What is the standard way to sync any two units (possibly not of the same manufacturer) to near-sample-accurate level these days?

Yeah, it was for sample-accurate sync without having to start from the beginning (so: positional, but sample-accurate).  In my experience MTC and SMPTE never really got it (not sample-accurate), but ADAT sync (I used cubase and RME Multiface, syncing to, e.g. an Emu Darwin) worked beautifully.  Find a location and hit "play" on the master, the slave would locate and lock with no phase or comb filtering issues or anything.

Is this not doable any more?

Would love to hear how others are doing it, especially without having to hook up other equipment.  One use case would be multiple people working on a long multi-tracked audio project on their own computers.  How to keep the audio data in sync?  One way would be to render out zero-based-start-time files for each track so they would line up.  But for very long projects, if you wanted to sync over a short piece of audio that doesn't start until very late in the project, syncing the computers together and just recording across 8 tracks at a time is quick, easy, and doesn't require generating large files of mostly silence.

You're right, the days of actually running synced machines to create more tracks are probably mostly over, but ADAT sync was still enormously useful for other sorts of things.

Anyone else, how do you go about keeping selected audio tracks in mulitple projects on different computers in sync or copied across accurately (time-wise)?  Sample-accurate is sometimes helpful due to, for instance, multi-mic'ed instruments.

Interesting, although with broadcast wave files the process would still require an explicit export operation for each track (which is clunky in this case... see my usage description below).  Is it sample-accurate?  I'll need to experiment a little but I wonder how widely "understood" (by various software) the embedded timing information is.  My Cubase manual does mention a "broadcast" option, but only mentions Author, Description, and Reference strings that can be embedded.  Perhaps timecode is assumed?   In any case, this might at least be a space-saving (if not work-saving) option depending on how accurate it is.

Regarding the ADAT 9-pin use-case: no, not necessarily common DAW software.  Basically, when a writing partner and I get together to collaborate, we each have our own version of a common work in progress.  These versions may be wildly different in terms of what is recorded (because we are working on our own disparate visions) but often we do have an agreed-upon timeline, perhaps a set of drum tracks already, etc.

We hook the ADAT sync cable between the two (you have to have, apparently, old hardware that supports ADAT sync now... this is the crux of the problem), make one the master, one the slave, then if one of us has an area of audio that we want the other to have, *in phase-accurate sync* (because sometimes we are dealing with multi-mic'ed sources), we just play the two DAWs in sync at that area and put one in record mode for the couple/few minutes needed.

It's nice and easy and it's a little bit of a bummer that there's no real common, no-additional-gear-on-both-ends-needed way to do this any more if that's really the case.  I thought this was a common use-case, but maybe not?

Mattias, is the TCO option only available for the ff800 (for someone using a laptop. that is)?

Randyman, okay, I just did a little test and after some fussing I was able to export audio from a location and pull it into cubase at the same location (down to the thousandths-of-a-second resolution anyway, as per display... can't confirm if this is sample-accurate at this point).

The problem is, just the import process is a couple of steps (can't just import files, you have to pull them into the audio pool, then pull them from the pool into the project explicitly telling it to do so "at origin")

So between setting up and doing the export, and fiddling with the import, this is unfortunately not nearly as easy as hooking an adat sync cable between two interfaces, checking the sync box in cubase, and going.

To further elaborate on the use-case:  right, this is not for remote working.  It is in the same physical location.  No KVM needed, just two laptops and two interfaces that have ADAT sync cable capability.  And yes, a mixer with a stereo input for each laptop.  Oh, and an ADAT lightpipe connection between the two as well, and voila 8 simultaneous tracks available.

Let's say two of us get together to work collaboratively on a project on which we had been working out individual parts on our own.

When in sync, we can try person A's drum/bass/rhythm tracks against person B's different vocal bed experiments for example.  Group solo, playback, change group solo to different take, playback again, discuss, try, etc... when ready, to transfer over some tracks, just arm/record on one and play on the other.  It's pretty painless in practice.  For non-physical meeting, yes, the bwave approach and some cloud storage definitely seems the way to go.  This is more for being in the same room and trying and discussing.

I do realize that unfortunately things change.  It appears that the equipment to make this paradigm work is now harder to find and not inexpensive.  Oh well.  At least now I think I have a clearer picture of where things are.  Thanks for the elaboration.

Ah, interesting, I never paid attention to VST System Link... will need to try it.  If it works it would at least solve the problem when both sides are Cubase which is at least a reasonable fraction of the time.  Thanks for the pointer.

I hope I'm not being pedantic, but just for completeness' sake, it didn't seem to me that you could just drag into project.  Well, actually, I just tried importing directly in (say "yes" when it says "create tracks?") and it defaulted to placing the new audio segments at the locator point.  I did not see an obvious way to change the default.  I googled around a bit, and what I found seemed to indicate that you needed to go the pool first, then "import at origin" from there.  I could be wrong, that's just where I ended it.

Just wanted to put this in here for maybe my future self once I've gotten a new interface and forgotten the details of this conversation.

And I agree, re-recording does have that make-work element to it, but in practice it just worked out to be less steps than export/copy/import/place.  "It is what it is" as they say... I'm bummed the adat sync capability is gone, but I'm certainly glad there are alternatives.