Your instrument
Back up your instrument before you send anything. Nord Sound Manager makes a full backup. What is supported says which instruments have been tested.
Connecting
Close Nord Sound Manager first, since it keeps the USB connection to itself. Then click Connect an instrument… in the browser, or Instrument ▸ Connect…. The browser asks you to pick the device. The desktop app takes the first Nord it finds.
Once connected, drawbar reads every folder the instrument declares, a bank at a time, and the instrument’s controls appear: Read and Send in the toolbar, the Keyboard tab, the send queue, and the inspector’s room meters. Read rereads everything, and each folder has its own Read again.
Slots are labelled the way the panel shows them, 7:4 Africa Split. Empty slots
are listed too, as places to drop things.
Slots
Right-click a slot to Open, Copy to this computer, Load on instrument, Rename, Duplicate or Delete…. Rename happens straight away, because renaming back is its own undo. Delete asks first.
Drag to move things:
- a slot onto This computer copies it;
- a sound onto a slot queues it for sending;
- a slot onto another slot in the same folder swaps the two, losing nothing.
A slot that cannot take what you are dragging does not light up. Drop anyway and the log says why.
The send queue
Nothing is written until you send. Drops, Queue for sending, and Save on a sound that belongs to a slot all add to the queue in the bottom dock. Each row shows its destination: click it to change it, × to remove the row, and pick a row to see what would change on the keyboard.
Send all asks once, listing every destination and what it replaces, then writes folder by folder. If the instrument refuses an item, that folder’s batch stops there. What was written stays, and the rest stays queued. The queue also survives a disconnection.
A sound’s name goes with it, minus the file extension: Africa-Split.ne5p on
this computer becomes Africa-Split on the panel.
Safety
- drawbar never leaves a write session open. Each write opens one, finishes, and closes it, so an interrupted transfer cannot leave the instrument stuck on its progress screen.
- A move is a swap, never an overwrite.
- Writing into an occupied slot deletes the old sound first, because the instrument refuses to overwrite in place. drawbar reads the old sound into memory before deleting it, writes it back if the new write fails, and if that fails too, keeps its bytes on this computer as a rescued sound.
- Live slots and Settings are overwritten in place. Writing Settings reloads the selected program, so unsaved panel changes are lost. drawbar warns before it does this.
- Writing to the slot the panel is playing reloads it, when drawbar itself selected that slot.
These behaviours have been confirmed on an instrument. Progress shows on the instrument’s own display; drawbar shows a spinner and cannot know a percentage.
Disconnecting
Unplug, and the instrument’s rows and controls disappear. The send queue is kept, so plug back in, review it, and send.