One band. A shared click. No rig.
A prototype that gives every musician in a band a synchronized click and spoken cues on their own phone, without an audio interface or in-ear packs.
The call
Never send audio. Sync a clock.
Streaming audio between phones over Wi-Fi is how you get latency and drift. Unicue shares a clock and a few events instead. Every phone calculates the same timeline and plays its own click. Nothing heavy travels the network, so the hard problem shrinks to one question I can measure. Above roughly fifteen milliseconds of offset a click sounds like a flanger and the product does not exist. Below five, it does.
The situation
A wireless in-ear pack costs three to eight hundred dollars. Multiply by a band and the wall you hit is money, not talent. I play live, and I have watched bands skip the click entirely because the gear to share it was out of reach. Every musician already has a phone.
What I built
A core in C++ shared by iOS and macOS: timeline, clock sync, scheduler, engine, session, conductor. A working iPhone app with profiles, a song library, a structure editor, setlists with transitions, a live mode, and rehearsal rooms you join with a three-digit code. A Mac console that can host or follow. And, because "it sounds fine" is not a measurement, my own instruments: a headless node that logs link state twice a second, a multichannel recorder that complains when it drops samples, and an analyzer that reports offset and drift for every pair of devices.
That recorder earned its keep on day one. A standard tool was silently returning 26.8 seconds when asked for 30, which shrank every offset it measured in the same proportion. Invisible to the eye, wrong in the numbers.
Where it stands
A research prototype, not an alpha. The engineering is verified by tests and by a measurement rig, and a single device works end to end. The question that decides whether Unicue becomes a product is still open: does the offset stay under five milliseconds with several real phones on ordinary Wi-Fi? Building features before answering that would be work done blind, so the next milestone is the measurement, not the roadmap.
From here, three directions sit on the same system: be the whole rig for a band that has none, distribute time from a rig that already exists, or turn a phone into the seventh in-ear pack a band did not buy.
A closer look
Swipe or drag to explore. Use the arrows to move between views.
