Hi, I use vvvv for visuals synced with ableton for live audio for individual songs which are played in order during a set.
Once they are actually both triggered together they stay in sync surprisingly well without needing to share a timecode. I’ve tested that repeatedly up to 30mins or so.
But I’ve had real life problems triggering the two reliably together, normally during gigs (ggrrrr) so I decided it might be better if they could at least talk to each other and then I could add a “force sync” control to slave the video to the music if they were miles out.
I tried the ableton control patches (using liveOSC) which I fought with for 2 days straight of trying everything with zero success (could never get the two to communicate).
Also looked into the MTC but as has been said here ableton doesn’t do that.
So right now I’m using a bodge using midi clock and unusual time signature (64/1 @ 100bpm) in ableton with each song given its own fixed time slot of 20mins (so that I can easily translate the midi clock to percentage through the song) and then I just use midi triggers to jump to the next track. when nothing’s on screen it just jumps to a silent loop way off at the end. The project is always set to “play” at all times (removing the chance of the play buttons not working from triggers like what happened at a gig once)
This way I can also have two big numbers up on screen (frame no from ableton and from vvvv) so I can see straight away if there’s a problem. I have a force sync button which jumps to the frame from the ableton timecode. Which makes it briefly jerky but normally fixes it from there onwards.
It works but it’s a butt ugly solution. Can’t help thinking there must be something more elegant.