Noise Engineering Univer Inter: USB and MIDI to CV in 6HP, configured however you want

Take 6HP of Eurorack space, add MIDI in and out, USB MIDI, and 8 outputs – then have those outs do whatever you want. It’s Univer Inter, or “UI” for short – and crucially, it does have its own UI, via a powerful Web configuration tool.

There’s a ton of power behind Univer Inter‘s 6HP panel:

USB B port for connection to a host
MIDI in / out jacks (on minijack TRS)
Chainable for up to 16 outs
8 assignable CV or gate outputs

— and you can configure each out for:

Pitch with octave definition (which pitch is 0 V), bend amount in semitones
Trigger
Gate
Velocity gate: sets high voltage on note on, low voltage on note off
Velocity: sends voltage based on velocity value, changing with each new note
Off velocity
Aftertouch
Polyphonic operation and monophonic operation
Pitch bend
Sync (clock or gated clock)

Each output also has channel, delay (timing offset), and octave and note filters.

There are a ton of possible use cases here. You can set this up for a monophonic voice, or a drum machine (with triggers), polyphonic patching, syncing across sequencers and DAWs, dividing clock signals, and even DIN-sync style run and 24ppqn operation.

Now, I have a MIDI tool that I quite like, but I absolutely miss the Web UI. That’s the Threads 1U from After Later, based in turn on Mutable Instruments Yarns. It even has the same configurable 8 outs. (Well, it’s about the number that fits in this kind of form factor.) Yarns, too, has an absurd number of possible monophonic and polyphonic configurations, plus features like tuning. You can even use the outs as oscillators. (Edit: I should also mention a couple of other competitors. The endorphin.es Shuttle Control has a bunch of extras, including USB host – but takes up more space, which is why I went with the 1U module! It does look great, though. Bastl’s 1983 is also worth a look, especially if you’ve got a use case for its automatic tuning feature, and fits in 7HP.)

But actually using all that power means a complex set of menu diving, all with two-letter shortcuts since there’s no display. So having a Web-based UI makes tons and tons of sense. (I do hope vendors employing this start to offer an offline version, too, though, which is possible with these development frameworks.)

It’s really only the tuning support i see missing on the Noise Engineering unit. It is awfully nice having 1U support, though, so no remorse here!

But while updating another of Noise Engineering’s modules, I had a look at the UI, and it looks great:

The Univer Inter just started shipping, priced at US$275. MIDI turns out to be surprisingly useful in the world of Eurorack, blasphemous thought as that may be! (Hey, why not use both MIDI and CV?)