U-SYNC curiosity
Posted: 22 Aug 2025, 18:59
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
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
