Sim'n Tonic Forums

Hello everyone, Merry Christmas.

I found a Nome II under the Christmas tree. Interaction with Ableton works fine - loving it!

I was wondering the following. What is the best practice for midi forwarding?

I want to use my Mac with Ableton 12 as a sequencer to send midi notes to my synth hardware. Currently I do this via External Instrument without U-Sync. The sync looks good with this method!

Do I have to run a track with the U-Sync plugin in parallel to have peace of mind for perfect sync?
What are my disadvantages if I do it as described above? Will I have jitter?

Happy holidays!

Hi - Merry Christmas!

Well I would love to hear how other people use the forwarding feature as well.
I would personally simply send the MIDI Data to the "MIDI Out 1" or "MIDI Out 2" USB-MIDI interfaces directly from Ableton, without any other device/plugin.

U-SYNC is not related to this at all, it is only used for syncing. How do you currently sync? Do you get Ableton to follow the Nome over USB?

So in this case it is working like a standard usb-midi interface? is there any difference to it? Will it be tight not using u sync?

Yes, you're correct, it works exactly like a USB-MIDI interface (it is one, in fact).
And no, U-SYNC makes no difference for MIDI forwarding, U-SYNC is only used for clock/start/stop, not for sending other MIDI data like Notes, CC, etc.

Ok. So what i imagine is, that i use a midi pattern in ableton and send it via nome II to my synth. by using u-sync on top i get precise start/stop/sync for this pattern.
what i don't get is: if am using the nome II just as a class compliant midi interface, is the whole syncing feature obsolete?

AlDo wrote: ↑03 Jan 2025, 12:21 Ok. So what i imagine is, that i use a midi pattern in ableton and send it via nome II to my synth. by using u-sync on top i get precise start/stop/sync for this pattern.

Is this what you are doing now - or you are just speculating?

If you are speculating, then no, as I said U-SYNC will not change the timing of MIDI Notes. Maybe the receiving sequencer will "quantize" the MIDI Notes to the grid, but this is not something I have heard of before. Or the Nome could help you quantize the MIDI Notes to the grid - that would be an interesting feature - but for now it simply forwards the MIDI Note as soon as it received it.

So if you are sending the whole sequence from Ableton as MIDI Notes, the Nome will simply forward the Notes at the time they arrive, just like any other USB-MIDI Hub.

The syncing feature is usually used for sequencers that do the sequence, that only need MIDI Start/Stop to launch it, and then will sync their sequence to the MIDI Clocks sent by U-SYNC.

I hope that clarifies things a bit!

Simon