sidechained

I've been working with Max and the Novation Nocturn for a while now and am generally pretty satisfied with what it can do, but one thing has been niggling me.

I have a live-looping patch which consists of a number of "pages" of settings on the Nocturn itself. In my Max patch I'd like to be able to display a large number showing the page that I'm currently on (in order to avoid tweaking the wrong setting by accident).

The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, no MIDI information is sent out when the page up/down buttons are pressed (at least, not when monitoring with ctlin). Is there another way to monitor the raw output of the device? I saw a similar thread posted re: the Korg Nanocontrol, so perhaps there are parallels to how this or other controllers work.

Also if anyone has found any published MIDI specification for the Nocturn this would also come in very handy. Not sure how protective Novation are over these things...

Strange that there's not been much discussion of the Nocturn on the list at all (either that or I haven't found the posts).

detecting-novation-nocturn-page-change-nocturn-midi-specification

You're right - it doesn't appear that the page buttons send any MIDI info. You could program the other buttons on the Nocturn to send unused CC or Note On/Off messages to Max and use those to change your 'pages'. I like my Nocturn but when using it with Max it doesn't offer much that other controllers don't offer as well.

Thanks for the response - there's definitely some things the Nocturn wasn't made to do, and this could be one of them.

Your reply suggests there may a way to change the currently selected page by sending a MIDI CC message to the Nocturn. Have you tried this? This would solve my problem, as all I really want the patch to do for now is to flip the relevant page when I let go of the recording button.

Sorry, no I haven't tried changing the page on the Nocturn remotely. I guess I misunderstood and thought you wanted to go the other way - have your Max patch change pages when you pressed the page + and - buttons on the Nocturn. I've never seen any documentation on what sort of MIDI messages the Nocturn responds to, if any. If you find something, let us all know!

I'll do some digging and see what comes up...

For anyone who might be interested, I got an e-mail back from Novation support saying that the only way to change pages is to use the + or - buttons on the Nocturn itself (not possible by sending messages to it).

I also asked for a spec for the Automap MIDI Client, and the response was that it can only send out CC 0-127, pitch bend and Note On and Off messages (no mention of what it can take in).

Of course there might be some secret undocumented features, but if so they're not willing to reveal them!

Detecting Novation Nocturn Page Change / Nocturn MIDI Specification