My setup is the norns shield + OP-Z. It is a lovely combo. However, pushing audio from the headphone output of the latter to the input of the former gives a low signal even with OP-Z volume is turned all the way up, and so sound quality isn’t great. Sure my audio cable isn’t great either. But since I am connecting these two devices with USB anyway for MIDI, I wanted to pass audio too.
So I made a little norns program for it, called connect-opz. And while there are some issues, it works – the audio cable is gone.
Basically I open the program, enable OP-Z, and from then on OP-Z is the audio device for all other programs, without disabling norns’ own audio inputs and outputs.
This is a bit of a private project, but I want to shared it regardless. It is written for a specific device (OP-Z) and for a specific user (me), but the idea would generalize to standards compliant USB audio devices. Reimplementing this whole contraption as part of the norns configuration as udev
rules etc would perhaps make more sense, or re-starting jack/alsa with the OP-Z as the audio device instead of, not together with the norns audio (-d hw:0
→ -d hw:1
). My desire is that this program goes away.
But this is it for now, and I also am looking for some excuses to write these norns programs and “staying within the (norns) product” rather than spend all my time doing basically GNU/Linux configuration – though I am convinced this would be better solved another way. Comments and ideas welcome.
Warning: please always disable OP-Z in the program before disconnecting it or turning it off. Not doing so results in loud noises which can harm your hearing, and also leave your norns in an unstable state until a restart.
Requirements
- norns
- teenage engineering OP-Z
Installation
Clone the repo, ie.
ssh we@norns.local
cd dust/code
git clone https://github.com/xmacex/connect-opz
Troubleshooting
If you disconnected or turned off OP-Z without disabling it in the program first (please don’t do it), please restart norns to get rid of a faulty process running on norns.