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Dear lazyweb,

Do you all know how many midi clock beats (0xf8) there is in a bar? It looks around 90 but I still don't know. Thank you so much!!

pretty sure it's 96

At first I thought this was a joke about someone entering a bar.

Midi clocks enter the bar.

Why the long phase? The bartender asks.

Ran out of bandwidth.

There are 24 MIDI clocks per beat. How many there are in a bar depedens on your time signature.

does it not depend on what ppq the program/seq use?

for example : akai mpc3000 : 96 ppq
emu sp1200 : 24 ppq
atari cubase : 384 ppq

No, PPQ has nothing to do with MIDI ticks, which are used for device synchronization. The PPQ is the resolution of MIDI files (or other MIDI-based project files) and can be higher than the MIDI clock that is used for timing synchronization.

ahhh thx

i missunderstud the question

BTW, all of that is documented in The Complete MIDI 1.0 Detailed Specification. You probably don't need to read all of that but keeping it as a reference to answer questions like this one is really useful.

Thanks!!! You fellas are always so helpful !

Aww come on, I didn't have much to work with.. ;)

Can't we just agree that the joke was awesome?

I didnt think that was a negative.gif

24 clocks = 1 quarter note, so if you have 4/4 time signature, then there are 4 * 24 = 96 MIDI clock ticks per bar. (MIDI clock means a Status Byte 0xF8)

By the way, the clocks are just ticks. None of them says which one is the first tick of the measure (bar) or beat, you only get the speed from MIDI clock. Just like a wall clock ticking, you can count how many seconds have passed, but the tick sounds don't say which of them the clock considered the start of a new minute or hour. (Assuming a situation where this is true.)

Stock, Aitken, and Waterman did some in-depth exploration of MIDI. You can check their findings here