I hear you about straight up session exchange facilities, it’s often an issue.
Hadn’t had any issue with latest Waves on ilok2. I checked a whole bunch of them, however very briefly because they’re not really needed in the second software. Same for the dsp cards.
As far as having two software open just for track exhange or quick auditioning, you don’t need any synchronization, and a third party master clock or any master-slave config will have nothing to do with it.
You can do different sample rates as long as you use two separate drivers-soundcards.
The only issue with that is fully resolving the two DAWs - if you need such a thing.
To be specific, there are two obstacles there:
- Transport sync: There’s no unit/software out there that will decode the timecode information that is embedded in a digital audio stream and then encode it at another sample rate. Why digital signals for LTC? It’s by far the most accurate option compared to MTC (over MIDI) and LTC over analog transmission.
- Converter/clock sync: There’s also no sync device available that will convert incoming clock to a non-integer one that’s in sync with the source frequency. What’s available is integer division and multiplication of the source clock frequency. That leaves out most of the possible source-destination sample rate combinations (the converters are then free-running).
Re transport sync, I also want to try patching MTC and MMC virtually. MIDI-Yoke and/or MIDI-OX might do the trick; could prove to be a very neat solution. I’d be looking at a MIDIoverLan type of solution for a two computer setup.
Perhaps it’s best to clarify again that if both software are running at the same sample rate then you’ve got none of these issues. That’s because there’s plenty of readily available solutions to accommodate the sync tasks. There’s also soundcards whose ASIO driver lets you use them in more than one software at once - this works for a single sample rate.