After a weekend of furious hacking, compiling and bug-hunting, I’ve finished a beta build of my control/editing interface for the Novation Supernova II synth.

It’s based on the Ctrlr project and offers a standalone executable AND a VSTi dll/AU with an extensive tabbed virtual controller mapped to lots of the Supernova’s most important CC and NRPN parameters.

Using Renoise’s MIDI Control device is fine for just a couple of params, but it’ll only do CC and each devices has a limited number of params – until now, I had multiple saved presets for the device which I had to laboriously load each time…

Now, however, you can basically treat the Supernova as a VST instrument – you send MIDI to it as you would a VSTi, it takes its own MIDI input from the Supernova (so knob/slider values are kept visually in sync), you can drop both CC and NRPN parameters (hundreds of them!) into an Automation device and go crazy. Except for a few really in-depth things which still have to be done by getting physical with the hardware, you can build complex patches from scratch within the controller and preview notes as you would with a VSTi.

This is a bit like Midi Quest by Sound Quest, with the slight difference that it looks better, it actually works and it’s completely FREE!

NOTE: eventually, there’ll be a *complete* CC/NRPN implementation, but this build only covers about 90% of the CCs and about 50% of the NRPNs. That’s because I wanted a controller that gave me DAW automation of critical parameters and also let me do a decent chunk of patch editing. For now, there’s some stuff you’ll still have to go to the hardware to do (and some stuff will never be available to software control, like the Osc Solo button), and I won’t invest time in doing the FULL implementation until Ctrlr has full sysex librarian capabilities – only then will it be worthwhile. But that’ll be reeeeally cool

NOTE #2: since most Windows MIDI drivers won’t let themselves be shared, you might have to play around with MIDI outs. I’ve got about 6 x MIDI I/O so I haven’t had problems…

NOTE #3: Nova/Nova Laptop owners – not sure if this’ll work for you, but it’s worth a try. I know lots of the mappings will probably be the same, but I make no promises 

Check it out here. There are also other Ctrlrs for other hardware synths on there. Next on my personal to-do list is possibly the Roland JV-1010 (although Roland have made it a REALLY complicated task…not sure if I can be arsed).

I also have a Virus B with some broken buttons, so I’m busy making an editor for that too. It’s mostly finished, though there’s fine-tuning and some UI tidying/graphics work to be done. There are a few commercial editors out there (not all of which seem to work very well), but my version will – again – have the advantage of being free and open source. In other words, if you think I’ve got it totally wrong and you want to do it better, you’re just an SVN checkout away from being able to do it

Here’s an indication of my progress on the B editor… I’ve owned a Virus TI Snow for a week or two and while it’s great, the band that I’m mainly using it in now has a Polar, and I have the B (old and broken though it is), so I’m going to sell it on and use the money to fund a repair of the B (not cheap, since there’s only one company in the world that can get spare parts from Access and do the job, and they’re in Germany). So bear in mind that while I’ve boxed up the Snow ready to ship when it sells, I’m quite happily using the Virus B VSTi in Renoise and Ableton to control, automate and record the B \o/ In other words, it’s very useable for me and will soon be very useable for everyone!

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So it turns out they last pretty well. And in this age of 1541 emulators, MMC64 interfaces and the like, it’s sad to see a Datasette sitting unused and unloved. So I decided to lavish about four quid on mine and turn it into a block-rocking pimp star supreme with:




# an internal speaker

# internal 9v battery power

# an external in (for when I eventually get the recording head to work)

# a line/headphone output

# a switch/knob for power and drive motor speed control (though this doesn’t really work yet)

# an unfeasible amount of mystery line noise, which I’m going to pretend is intentional and adds ‘character’.

As usual, my half-arsed attempts to document the process fell flat since I’ve lost the proprietary charger for my proper camera (damn you, Samsung) but I caught a few snaps on my phone cam and some of them aren’t too dreadful. Eventually I’ll get some video of absolute junglist techno dub rave spaz horror madness being perpetrated with this tremendous device.

Table full of crap - Datasette innards, a copy of Firelord, an op-amp circuit and some other bits.

Closeup - motor on the left, counter above it, now-redundant LED (used to signify data writing), Firelord again!

Squeaker! Louder than it looks, but the biggest that'll fit in the case snugly.

Ghetto-style Dremel speaker grille.

...and that's where that goes

Everything cut, drilled, inserted, etc.

Hells yeaowh

Finished product. Sort of.

So does it work? Well… Yes. Basically. The speed control isn’t right yet – possibly because Commodore put a regulated motor in that stops dead below a certain input voltage. Although it’s supposed to take 5v and I’m giving it 9ish… and it falls off below 90% of the pot. Oh well.

Some other stuff isn’t spot-on yet, either. I couldn’t be bothered with the LED, but that’s a possibility. Oh, and like I said, the recording isn’t working perfectly.

The final shame? I don’t actually have any audio on tape to test in this! I’ve only got data cassettes, so I’ve been chilling to the blissful binary of Revenge of The Mutant Camels, Arkanoid and Firelord all night. I’m reasonably satisfied that I’m getting what’s on the tape out through the speaker/line, so that’s fine. Oh, and my speaker cut-out for when something’s plugged in isn’t working very well either – probably dodgy soldering on my part. Twill be fixed.

Updates will come…

This is really cool – some guys found a bit of sourcecode for the old Grafx2 edit tool and they’ve been working it up into an SDL app with extra features, open source and, most importantly, proper documentation (for the first time ever).

For those who don’t know, Grafx2 was an MS DOS app designed to be a lot like the legendary Deluxe Paint series on the Amiga, with pixelartists specifically in mind. Anyway, PulkoMandy (one guy? Two? I’m not sure) has been describing his progress in this pouet thread and he reckons that when the config tool is finished, keyshortcuts will be customisable. Hooray!

Anyway, a full nine years after the unfinished Win32 beta first appeared, here is the 97% finished up-to-date release