Norns is more of an ‘open platform’ than an instrument, this tends to mean some coherence is lost, as different developer have different approaches.
(in the same way as a computer, has different daws with different ideas about workflows)
like anything, there are some ‘architectural’ limitations (as well as cpu/mem limitations of a rPI)
its only using a single core for audio (as they found issues with SC multi core implementation - supernova… unless they have reverted again )
the (lua) scripts are not capable of dsp, and cannot be sample accurate nor 100% predictable time. (SC engines are)
of course, thats not to say it’s not a very capable platform - I think it is.
but it makes trade-offs for flexibility/ease of use, that dedicated instruments probably don’t (e.g. octatrack/deluge etc)
does that matter? well that all depends on your use-case.
Yeah, the fact that this kind of script isn’t readily available is pretty surprising, but I imagine it will be mitigated soon. When you and I first got our Norns and were chatting, I started working on a simple looper / quantized sampler type script (eg blackbox), but was running into too many headaches with pops and clicks. I’ll still try to get back to it at some point but I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to deal with figuring out crossfade issues and the like.
Some of these new features are super exciting (waveform view!) and I think they are heading in the right direction.
Yeah, I recall those (very nice) chats, and as I understand it, this is softcut’s achilles heel. It doesn’t seem to respond all that well to anything that requires rock solid timing in a live context (such as live recording). Though mlr does it nice enough, and cheat codes has something going which resembles synchronized recording. But the implementations are by no means straight forward, nor are the results
Still, mlr in in particular is an amazing application. Cheat codes is a fantastic accomplishment as far as pushing the platform goes, but that one is less obvious in its actual application.
For all the Norns’ limitations and peculiarities, something like the new Buoys script is hard to imagine on any other hardware (I’m sure it’s possible, but I’m enjoying its soothing 808 sample-triggering waves right now…)
yeah, I’ve grown accustom to using Norns for more abstract sample mangling then anything synced (until I have time to dig into it myself). fortunately I have a lot of use cases for that
I still plan to build my “perfect” version of a live performance tool some day which is essentially a version of Blackbox’s live looping / synced loop triggering, but with more hands on audio mangling control. but no real rush on that until I can actually perform live again.
I did find syncing Awake in either its Rings or Passersby variety to my Analog 4 for a live radio set was rather lovely, but no sample-mangling was involved at that point.
I’m sure someone smarter than I could get some nicely synced looping / Blooper-esque audio mangling going. I think Cheat Codes has synced looping so it’s definitely possible. I had a sort of - punch in / punch out Grid based step sequencer working, but as mentioned before it had lots of pops / clicks. I bailed on the project as soon as I ran into those issues since I didn’t feel like I had the bandwidth to go down a debugging rabbit hole. I definitely plan to in the future if no one else comes up with something that fulfills my needs before then! I found it to be a really lovely device to develop software on (much more so than my past experiences using PureData).
Interesting; I’d not been able to get midigrid to work with MLR before now; just tried it and it seems interesting, especially with single-cycle waveforms, though I have no idea how like a Blooper it is as I don’t have one.
Is that stuff you record into it (I haven’t tried that yet) or psets with loaded samples, because I tried the latter and it seems (seems) to work OK as far as I can tell. I can see how not saving samples you record might be bothersome.
I’ve gotten mlr to work with either mlr or mlr64 (can’t remember which) using midigrid with my launchpad pro. It was a little while ago so I don’t remember all the details. Are you adding the line from the midigrid script to the top of the mlr script?
I know, right? I keep thinking I should be posting this over there… and since both forums use Discourse and there’s some crossover of members and avatars I’m having difficulty separating where I am… again.
I am, but with the forked mg_128 script which lets you use 2x Launchpads - though I currently only have one! Midigrid won’t work for me with MLR in its current 128 grid version; but thanks for reminding me that MLR64 exists, because I just grabbed a fork of that and it seems to work so far with midigrid… time to test!
Hi!
I’ve just order norns shield encourage for fact is been sold soldered, and only it needs to assembly. I’ve started to looking for rPi and micro sd. Do you know if I get a difference of use or something between a Pi B or Pi B+ ? In other hand, I wonder if is it important the size of the card to sampling or something… any thoughts?
Thanks!
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