I've got a Nome2 and use it with my band's practice and gigs to do 2 things, for now:
1) provide the audio click to all band members, through our X32 rack mixer. This works great.
2) provide MIDI clock to our keys player's synths for arpeggio's, sequences and stuff. Works great as well.
I would love to use the Nome2 for a third thing:
3) use it to control Reaper in a band practice setting.
Sometimes we use backing tracks when we're not all present. We have all of our audio tracks in Reaper.
I found out that Reaper doesn't sync to midi clock. That means, if I understand correctly, that Reaper will not be a slave to the tempo sent by the Nome2. That's unfortunate, but since I have the Nome2 and Reaper both set at the same correct tempo for every song anyway, it's not a big deal.
Reaper does sync to MTC, but the Nome2 doesn't send that.
The one thing I managed to get working, is setting Reaper up to "enable synchronization to time code" (right click the play button) ad then use "SPP: Nome II" as input. That way, Reaper will start playing when I hit the play button on the Nome. When both tempos are identical, they start off in perfect sync. Pressing the play button on the Nome2 again stops Reaper playback. Pressing play on the Nome2 again restarts playback in Reaper from the beginning of the project.
After a while though, the tempos starts to audibly drift a bit. After 20 minutes there's an audible difference between both clicks. Not a huge problem, since most songs are around 5 minutes, but it has me wondering how, and even why, this method works.
Questions I have:
- why does this sync method work? The Nome2 does send SPP messages, then? And since there's a noticeable tempo drift between the Nome 2 and Reaper after a while, does that mean that SPP that Nome 2 sends it a start-stop message, and no synchronization after that?
- could the Nome2 be developed to send MTC, after a future firmware update? And would that even help with the tempo drift?
- if MTC from the Nome2 would not be feasible, would anyone know of another drift-proof way to control Reaper from my Nome2?
My technical and theoretical understanding of the principles of MIDI and DAWs are flawed, so I don't know what to expect in terms of future functionality of the Nome2.
Any links to posts/articles/further reading about these things would be appreciated. I'm getting into the subject but I'm just a simple drummer who used to just bash things. Now all of a sudden I'm expected to know stuff about the inner workings of gear with buttons.
