Miranda (aka pulu) Finnish electronic artist and livecoder, is doing the archaic things others won’t. That includes bringing your Novation Nocturn back from the dead, using ancient versions of SuperCollider on iBooks and Mac OS 9, and sharing some truly happy jams.
So much music gear seems to have an expiration date. The Novation Nocturn was a cute, compact controller from the late 2000s with crossfader and automapping capabilities. But those features required now-abandoned software. It was acceptable in the 2000s, I guess. (Gladly, gear makers now far more frequently use standard class-compliant drivers and MIDI implementations!)
But fret not. Thanks to pulu, we get a modern userspace driver that works with MIDI and OSC across macOS 10.12+, Linux (Debian is directly supported), and Windows – all built with Rust and libusb (which makes this worth checking out even if you haven’t got the gear).
Fab:
bring your Novation Nocturn to life again! (and maybe other Automap-based devices in the future)
autocrap is a cross-platform userspace “driver” which provides input and output to the device via MIDI or OSC, allowing it to be used with any application that speaks these protocols.
autocrap is highly configurable to support different use cases, ranging from typical DAW controls to fully custom programming.
Licensed under an LGPL v3, complete source code, fairly easy build, and pre-built drivers with detailed notes:
https://github.com/ahihi/autocrap
But I hope you’re still reading if you haven’t got a Nocturn, because pulu has some wonderful music, including these insanely happy jams:
Check that Bandcamp! Plus … wow, there’s an entire livestreaming set of retro SuperCollider, running on Mac OS 9 and an iBook. If you need to make music in a post-apocalyptic landscape on retro gear, pulu is one of the people you want in your bunker. (I feel satisfied that I could tell it was 9 and not 8.6 from the screenshot.)