I noticed that I did not get a countdown in live mode when I have the “clock sync” option enabled. This is a bit surprising. Couldn’t find anything in the manual about this feature, if it’s intentional I think it should be documented. That the bpm is set externally shouldn’t prevent a countdown.
Disclaimer: I don’t know if this has any effect on it or not, just a thought:
Is the START/STOP option on or off? Just thinking that you can’t countdown on a midi start message, so it’d be logical to disable the whole countdown function if start/stop is externally controlled. I agree just receiving midi clock shouldn’t affect the ability to countdown as such.
Start/stop is set to off. Just switching on clock sync in a new project disables countdown for me. I might have saved some other setting, but I still think it should work.