U-SYNC curiosity

Any questions about the Midronome (Nome I) or Nome II
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autopoiesis
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Aug 2025, 18:35

U-SYNC curiosity

Post by autopoiesis »

Hi Simon,

Considering buying a Nome II, but to be frank I'm a bit put off by the shroud of mystery regarding how U-SYNC is implemented over USB, which gives notoriously unreliable timing for MIDI clock messages. I don't like to buy products on faith. Have I missed anything in the manuals or various Facebook / Youtube / Instagram comments that might explain how this works? The best guess that GPT-5-Thinking could offer was, "The U-SYNC background daemon talks to the hardware over USB. Instead of raw MIDI clock ticks, it streams tempo/phase info at high resolution. The DAW’s audio engine (which is sample-accurate) and the daemon cooperate to minimize drift; the device smooths any packet jitter before generating hardware clock. The Nome II then recreates a steady 24 PPQ clock in its hardware using a PLL/NCO and stable crystal so that the outgoing DIN-MIDI clock, start/stop and modular clocks are tight and bar-aligned." Is that about correct, or did the LLM hallucinate wildly there?

I'd just really appreciate if you could gesture a bit towards how this is implemented without giving up your special sauce. I have two USAMOs -- one dedicated to sending clock and start/stop, and another dedicated to sending MIDI notes -- and although their cooperation with Bitwig has been stable, they are really not fun to reconfigure when that's needed. I'd love to upgrade at least the clock-dedicated USAMO to a Nome II if I had some more confidence about how it works.

Cheers :)
Simon
Posts: 1254
Joined: 09 Jan 2022, 22:08

Re: U-SYNC curiosity

Post by Simon »

Ha ha I love the LLM answer here :D :D

It's not completely off, but still quite wrong. The Nome as master clock is uber solid, and yes it uses a crystal and pure hardware to create the clock. But with U-SYNC, it's different, the timing is still dependent on the timing the USB packets are received at. So yes, if you cram that USB connection through a hub also running a super heavy video stream, for sure U-SYNC will suffer. But a direct USB connection, or a thunderbolt hub will be fine.

As for your concerns, the big difference between "traditional" USB Clock is the type of USB: U-SYNC uses raw USB packets to communicate with the device, not the whole USB-MIDI stack from the OS. Another point is that U-SYNC is just extremely complicated - it took 4-5 months of really intense R&D to get a decent beta, and it has about 5 different syncing mechanisms inside to compensate for any jitter or latency.

But instead of focussing on the tech details, I would suggest checking the usage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feQUWowbGvY (turn subtitles on and translate to English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgdWIz6wDbU (who actually speaks about the USAMO as well)

Simon
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