[PlanetCCRMA] Just thought you might like to know-- Korg nanoSeries

[Sean Beeson]

No, I'm not a Korg representative, but when hardware works right out of the
box on a Linux system it seems to be a natural thing to pass on the news.

Over the weekend I picked up the set of three USB Korg nano controllers
http://www.korgnano.com/ . Plugged them in not even bothering to read the
manuals and Jack recognized them right away without doing a thing, Fedora 10
64-bit here. They are programmable, which you need to use Korg's *Kontrol
Editor *found on their support site. The Editor has a Windows and OS X
version. I was able to run the Editor under Wine, again Fedora 10 64-bit
here, and have the editor see all the controllers through Jack without doing
a thing nor having to install Korgs special USB driver, which is funny
because under Window and OS X you need that driver. I had trouble with a lot
of other software under Wine and getting them to work with Jack on a Fedora
10 64-bit system. I saw some Wine updates come down recently and those may
have fix a few things in regards to the 64-bit version.

For $50 a piece I am pretty happy to have some really cool controllers. the
nanoKontrol, a transport and fader controller, can be set to use MMC
messages if you need that. I tried using it with RG, which worked with the
Play, Stop and Loop buttons, but the Record, Rewind and Forward buttons did
not work with it. I am suspecting it is an issue with RG and the dev who
worked on RG's transport knows of the issue I had and that this function
garnered a lot of attention, so better support may come. I have not tried it
with Ardour, yet. Nontheless, since they are programmible one can use any of
them as you wish and I see using the transport to control any CC# I wish for
live performaces and tweeking purposses for so many devices. If you have a
softsynth that takes controller changes it will work with them as well.
Using the nanoPAD with Hydrogen is fantastic. The flan and roll function
work great and the X,Y pad will bring new life to other synths. The nanoKey
has a butten that lets you whitch between sending notes and CC mesages, so
you can have preset CC messages triggered off to something if you like. Of
course, like so many other controllers that cost a lot more they all have
Scenes for different configurations.

One bad thing on the nanoKeys I got was a G key that sticks a little--they
are only fifty bucks a peice.

--Sean
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