Nord Lead 3 Librarian

A simple MacOS-only librarian and patch arranger for the Nord Lead 3.

It allows for drag-and-drop patch reordering, online auditioning and replacement, renaming, recategorization, and import/export to files and directly to and from the Nord Lead 3 via MIDI.

Written in Swift. Universal binary, supports Apple Silicon (ARM64) as well as Intel.

Version 1.0 is licensed under CC-BY-ND 4.0. Please read the LICENSE.txt file for more information and a link to the full license text.

This project is no longer maintained

As of November 2023 I have decided to no longer maintain this project. I intend to let it remain available as long as Github lets these free pages stay up, but I will not be releasing new versions of it, nor will I be responding to issues nor supporting it further.

Installing

1. Download the zip file and unzip it somewhere.
2. Drag the "Nord Lead 3 Librarian" executable to your Applications folder.
3. RIGHT-click (not double-click) on the "Nord Lead 3 Librarian" executable inside your Applications folder and choose "Open" from the popup menu.
4. In the dialogue box that opens, click "Open" again.
5. The program should henceforth open normally on subsequent attempts.

Quick start

1. Connect your Nord Lead 3 to your Mac via MIDI in some manner.
2. In the Nord Lead 3 Librarian, click the MIDI toolbar icon and choose the input and output ports. The MIDI icon will go green if the ports were opened successfully. This does NOT mean it sees your NL3 though, just that it opened the ports ok.
3. In the MIDI menu, select "Fetch all from synth".

If the MIDI communications are successful, this should query the NL3 and retrieve all programs and performances from it. At this point you should absolutely make a backup of your synth's memory by saving (File->Save) what you've just loaded, before messing further with it. Then you can drag and drop, rename, reorder, import from other sysex files in part or completely, and do a variety of other operations to manage the sysex data. It should behave largely similarly to the Nord librarians provided for their newer synths.

Notes

Use with RTP-MIDI and the iConnectivity suite of products has some issues - you can successfully dump the MIDI from the synth without issues, but sending the larger chunks of MIDI via RTP-MIDI does not seem to work correctly. It is currently recommended to use a USB connection to any iConnectivity devices when sending banks to the NL3.

Changelog

• 1.0 (85) Initial release
• 1.0.1 (93) Workarounds for issue with occasional malformed MIDIPackets from CoreMIDI (bad length)
• 1.0.3 (97) Fix bug in pane-switching and add duplicate detection.
• 1.0.4 (86) Fix 2 bugs, 1 with corrupted receive data, 1 with downloading individual banks.
• 1.0.5 (87) Fix bug where importing names sometimes ended up with invisible null characters.