Nano-Basket

I have two KORG nanoKONTROL MIDI controllers that I want to use with my Arch Linux system. The nanoKONTROL device itself is compatible with GNU/Linux but its bundled editor software isn’t (although I’ve read that the Windows version works under Wine). Thankfully, Roy Vegard Ovesen wrote Nano-Basket to provide a free software alternative to the KORG editor software.

Nano-Basket is described as being for the entire nanoSERIES but I suspect it only works with the nanoKONTROL (let me know if you’ve tried Nano-Basket with a nanoPAD or nanoKEY). Also, I have a version 1 device; hopefully Nano-Basket also works with version 2 devices.

Installation

Nano-Basket is a Python program. Specifically, it’s a Python 2 program because it depends on pygtk, which I believe is not compatible with Python 3.

On some systems, program python refers to Python 2. On others, python refers to Python 3 and python2 refers to Python 2. My system is of the latter type:

[steve@audio ~]$ python --version
Python 3.4.1
[steve@audio ~]$ python2 --version
Python 2.7.8

My system already had pygtk present, so the only missing dependency was python-pyalsa. It has to be the Python 2 version, which on Arch Linux is named python2-pyalsa. I installed it from the Arch Linux AUR.

I then downloaded Nano-Basket from its GitHub site. I clicked the Download ZIP button on the right side of the page. I extracted the zipped archive to get a folder named Nano-Basket-master.

Launching Nano-Basket

The instructions for launching Nano-Basket appear to be incorrect. They read:

Usage:
Open a terminal in the folder these files are, then run:
python ./nano_basket_gui.py

Perhaps try if you have errors with the above command:
python2 ./nano_basket_gui.py

This appears to be incorrect. Replace nano_basket_gui.py with nano_basket_main.py and the program should launch (assuming all dependencies are present).

It’s also possible to launch Nano-Basket by double-clicking nano_basket_main.py (assuming that the execute permissions are set appropriately). Double-clicking should launch the program if you have Python 2 and don’t have Python 3. If you have both Python 2 and Python 3, use a text editor to change the first line of nano_basket_main.py from:

#!/usr/bin/env python

to:

#!/usr/bin/env python2

You should now be able to launch nano_basket_main.py by double-clicking it.

Using Nano-Basket

The Nano-Basket window looks like this:

Nano-Basket is a JACK client, so before it can be used it needs to be connected bi-directionally with the nanoSERIES device:

To retrieve the device’s existing settings, select File > Download Scene from Device. The contents of the window should change to reflect the new information. I verified that the correct values were present for each control.

Edit the desired controls, then select File > Upload Scene to Device to update the device.

Nano-Basket has some limitations compared to the KORG software. You can only upload and download one scene at a time. Also, the File > Open… and File > Save… options appear to be reserved for future expansion; they currently don’t do anything.

Despite its limitations, I’m happy to have Nano-Basket.

‹ Multi-Track Recording with jack_capture

Cleaning Up ›

Tagged with: Nano-Basket, NanoBasket
Posted in Tools