The Transport

The Transport is a new feature in build 30. It is responsible for the generation of MIDI clocks that can be used to synchronize with external hardware devices or other applications, and is the primary mechanism for recording multiple tracks that play in synchronization with each other without drifting apart.

What the Transport does can be difficult to talk about, depending on your history with Mobius. For those that are relatively new, the Transport may seem obvious. All DAWs have a similar concept: a tape-like timeline with a tempo, time signature, a metronome, and control buttons like Play and Stop. Some of the more sophisticated hardware loopers do as well.

For those that have used Mobius for a long time, the need for the transport may not seem obvious. Tracks have long been able to generate MIDI clocks and synchronize with each other, so why would you be interested in something new that does the same thing?

I’m going to start by describing how the transport can be used from the perspective of someone new to Mobius, without any preconcieved notions about how things were done in the past. Later there is a section intended for older users that compares the transport with older, similar features and explains why you might wish to use the transport instead.

Transport Basics

Fundamentally, the transport is like a metronome. You give it a tempo, start it, and while it is running it will generate pulses or beats at that tempo. You can use these beats for several things, but mostly they are used to start and stop the recording of a track at exact times.

Simple metronomes only generate beats at a defined tempo. But it is usually desireable to think about music in larger units of time. No one turns to their band and says “let’s play a 48 beat blues!”. Beats are usually combined into larger units called measures or bars, and bars are then combined into even larger units called songs or in our case loops.

The Transport allows you to define three units of time: beat, bar and loop. When you create a synchronized recording you can choose to start and stop the recording on any of these three time units. The reordings may not all be exactly the same length but they will all share the same fundamental beat length.

These concepts should be familiar to anyone that has experience using a DAW. Synchronizing things with the Mobius transport is very much like synchronizing with the plugin host. It’s just that the transport lives inside Mobius and that gives us more control over how it behaves.