Beta testers wanted for Nomad 0.4; A running build on macOS!

Airell · Joined: Oct 21, 2019 Posts: 11 Location: Breda

Edit 2019-12-12 by Blue Hell :: as of this date there is a new Nomad version publicly available :: http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-71451.html :: I'm going to close this thread, for comments on the new version please start a new topic.

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Hello fellow Nord Modular (classic / G1) owners,

After a hibernation period of more than a decade, I thought it was time to revive the Nomad editor for the Nord Modular (classic). A short introduction: I created a GUI for the Nord Modular more than 15 years ago and in 2005 I gave my code to the guys who combined it with their project and created nmedit and later omad. Jan was also part of the nmedit project back then. After all this time I still feel a bit connected to those projects, but I’m aware that probably 0% of my original code is still intact. The only thing they kept was the name Nomad I came up with Wink

. When I saw NM’s were sold because of more macOS issues lately, I decided to try the unthinkable, make Nomad work again!

I have forked the 12 year old Nomad project on Github and have been working on a build with the main focus of getting things working again on macOS. Together with the help of Jan, WE DID IT! We have a working version for macOS again!

Now we are looking for a few beta testers. The focus now is make it runnable on macOS, but Windows or Linux users are welcome too of course.

If you want to test builds for us, that would be great, but there are some constraints (for Mac):
- The current beta build has not been tested on macOS Catalina as we have hardware issues (no 64bit drivers for our midi hardware yes)
- You need to be willing to fiddle around with Apple’s Audio Midi Setup / MIDI Studio. A 'virtual' midi device within Nomad will be created which is used in the Editor. Instructions will follow.
- It’s not ‘click and play’, you need to open the .app package and browse to the Nomad.jar file.
- There might be other issues with the Java/macOS combination, that's where these tests are for.

Please apply with the following information in a PM to me:
- OS brand and version; i.e. Mac 10.14 or Windows 10 or even Linux (Linux is not tested at all).
- Java version; i.e. Oracle, OpenJDK, 8, 9 ... 13.
- Midi hardware brand/type and driver version (not required, but handy info).

Good to know:
- The build right now is tested on macOS and Windows Java 8, update 202 (Oracle’s commercially last free version), but others might work (i.e. OpenJDK).
- The focus of this beta period is stability on macOS, the code base is still the same as ten years ago. Enhancements or requests will be noted, but not worked on yet.
- Catalina might still be an issue...
- Some hiccups in real-time communication have been detected so far, knob rotations and lights are not always reflected in Nomad.

I hope you are as thrilled as we are!

Regards,
Airell (Ian) and Blue Hell (Jan). Very Happy

blue hell · Posted: Sat Nov 30, 2019 4:51 am Post subject:

Ah there it is Exclamation

Great

Thank you for dusting it off Ian.

Some pics to illustrate the virtual MIDI port thingie.

midi_studio.png

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this is how my MIDI ports look in MIDI studio (Utilities/Audio MIDI setup.app)

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ports.png

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These are the virtual ports created by Nomad, watch the CoreMIDI4J prefix - those are the ones to be used

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nomad.png

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And this has been running without loosing contact for well over a week now

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Bambrose · Joined: Sep 22, 2018 Posts: 9 Location: London, UK

This is excellent news !
Thank you. I am still on an old version of Mac OSX (10.10) in no small part due to the desire to keep my Nord Modular going. This allows me to consider upgrading !!
I'll PM with system details. Happy to help with Beta testing if I can

Airell · Joined: Oct 21, 2019 Posts: 11 Location: Breda

Bambrose · Joined: Sep 22, 2018 Posts: 9 Location: London, UK

Roger that. Thanks Ian

Airell · Joined: Oct 21, 2019 Posts: 11 Location: Breda

I took Nomad 0.4 out of beta:
http://electro-music.com/forum/post-442760.html