NM Open - Info

2004-04-17

The NM Open project was started when Clavia announced to stop development and production of the NM 'classic' synthesizer. The project aims to create an open source editor program being able to replace the one made by Clavia.

Before Clavia's decision was taken some effort had already been going on to clarify the patch format for the Nord Modular and the structure of the MIDI messages as exchanged between the Nord Modular and its editor program. This work was intensified after the Clavia decision became public.

The NM open project found a home at SourceForge, but some information and software is available through my web site only.

Currently the patch format has been decripted and is publicly available, but the communications protocol still requires a lot of work. Notwithstanding the work to be done some interesting applications already begin to take shape, thanks to the efforts of Marcus Andersson.

Marcus created a patch loader utility running under Linux, and I made a port of his software to run under Windows.

Apart from all of this some work has been going on to create an editor program in the Java programming language.

My personal goal regarding this work was not only to document as much as possible for the Nord Modular, but I'm striving towards a 'Noodle Radio' project. In this project a central Nord Modular synthesizer is coupled to the internet through an audio streaming server. Patches for the synthesizer can be uploaded to a server which schedules them to be played on the synthesizer for public broadcasting.

I've decided to stop working with the NM Classic for Noodle Radio, and started working on a G2 version. Some preliminary info about how to convert patches into MIDI dumps can be found in the 'G2 patch info' section.