Developer Dr Schlange has introduced Nallely, a MIDI companion, designed to help you map MIDI controllers/instruments together, create/use virtual devices (LFOs, EGs) and more.
“About a month ago, I started writing a small Python abstraction to control my Korg NTS-1 via MIDI, with the goal of connecting it to any MIDI controller without having to reconfigure the controller,” notes Schlange. Things quickly got out of hand. I began extending the system to introduce virtual devices—LFOs, envelopes, etc, which could be mapped to any MIDI-exposed parameter on any physical or virtual device. That meant I could route MIDI to MIDI, Virtual to MIDI, MIDI to Virtual, and even Virtual to Virtual. Basically, everything became patchable.”
“It’s now turning into a kind of organic meta-synthesis platform—designed for complex MIDI routing, live-coding, modular sound shaping, and realtime visuals. “
Features:
- Programmatic seemless API to your MIDI Device
- Vvirtual devices (LFOs for example) you can connect to your MIDI devices (as source or target)
- “Introspective API” for auto-adaptive virtual modules
- Links are formally defined and are entities of the domain
- “Bouncy links”: links can trigger target port associated link to have reaction chains
- Python API code generator for your device if it is listed by the MIDI CC & NRPN database project
- Bind/unbind control/pad/key of your MIDI devices between each other or virtual devices, converting the CC between source and target if required
- Bind/unbind the velocity of the pad/key of your MIDI devices to any CC control
- Bind/unbind pad/key individualy to any control, note, parameter of MIDI devices or virtual devices
- Bind/unbind a key/pad to another one (even if not the same note, you can map a note to its octave on the same device or another one)
- Scaler for the values that goes from a source to a target: you can restrict the range of values that will be sent to the target,
- Auto-scaling: if you want the source to adapt to the range of the target without setting the range yourself
- Websocket-based bus on which external services can auto-register and expose parameters to which you can bind your MIDI/virtual devices in a seemless way
- LFOs composition with mathematical expressions
- Envelope Generator
- A web interface relying on a websocket protocol (named Trevor) which allows you to do graphically what you would ask Nallely to do in normal time (map devices, parameters, scalers)
- Interactive code playground in the browser (through Trevor UI) inspired by Smalltalk playground
- Small web-based widget oscilloscope integrated in the web interface
- Save/reload preset for any MIDI device
- Save/reload patch for full connection between MIDI devices and virtual devices
- Random preset generator for MIDI devices and virtual devices
- Full random patch generator (basic at the moment) with auto-generative capacity as virtual device (you can control it from MIDI devices or other virtual devices)
Availability:
Nallely is free, open source and available now.
It’s really cool that people are making tools like this and sharing them. This is some nice MIDI tinkering.
@stub thanks a lot for for the kind words!
I just updated Nallely and Trevor and made a pre-release. This pre-release embedds a new version of the UI, a lot of bugfixes and precompiled binaries that also can serve directly the web-ui and embedds some quick visuals. This drastically helps to setup everything, just download the binary and play with Nallely and Trevor.
You’ll also find more in the README about how to use Nallely and the broad philosophy behind Nallely.