I have a teensy-based homebrew sampler and I had the bright idea that it could be the clock master for my Pocket Operators, since the sampler itself doesn’t accept clock. I though I might be able to record some clock out from a PO, convert it to the correct sample format, and just play it out of the left channel of the line out of the sampler, like a big wannabe PO clock master.
It doesn’t work. It sounds like the PO clock, but it doesn’t make any downstream POs start. I’ve tried various tempos and various downstream POs.
The final chapter turns out to be that the homebrew sampler was capable of sending midi timecode. So once that was working, I used ‘mode 5’ of the OPLab to convert that into both modular timecode and Pocket Operator timecode. Sync nirvana.
Even that story had a twist, though. I couldn’t get mode 5 (“jack sync”) to work on the OPLab and couldn’t understand why. But then I looked at the release notes for the final firmware and noticed that it was in that update that mode 5 was introduced in the first place…in 2015! The previous owner hadn’t installed it, so I got the scary bonus experience of figuring out how to install that upgrade.