Keeping musical time with [transport]

For any musical project created in Max/MSP, or for any digital audio workstation for that matter, there needs to be a time keeping system - after all, music is the distribution of musical information across the time dimension. The time dimension can be understood in various ways such as seconds, minutes and hours, or ticks, beats and bars.

In every musical project I've created in Max/MSP, I have created my own time keeping system using [metro], [counter] and [select] objects. You can imagine my surprise then when I began to explore the [transport] object today. This is not the first time I have used the object, as I have came across it before - but didn't understand its purpose. But after a recent suggestion from my supervisor, I have to began to explore it within the context of Ableton Live, and realized that it can be used as a tool to observe and utilise transport data from the DAW.

I will now begin to experiment with using this as the universal time-keeping clock for the system - but I haven't quite figured out how to allow for varying trigger rates/beat values.