u/Clear-Cantaloupe-915

Hey everyone!

For the last few months I've been playing with the Circuit Tracks again, building tools to interact with it programmatically. Along the way I was even able to reverse engineer the project file format.

Since I did that, I've been playing with an idea: what if you could make a web synth that's fully compatible with the Circuit Tracks?

Well, I built it, and I wanted to share it with you!

https://webtracks.namirsab.dev/

webtracks lets you make music in your browser with the workflow we love. You can import and export projects and packs, so you can start something on the Circuit and finish it in the browser, or the other way around.

It's free, runs in the browser, and needs no account. I'd love to hear what you think, and what you'd want it to do next.

Tip: Better enjoyed on a tablet or laptop. Smartphone/small screens UX coming soon!

Disclaimer: this is a tribute and a fully non commercial project. Just done for the fun and in no way linked to Novation or Focusrite. I've used AI assisted programming to build it.

Hey everyone!

CT owner here. I've been hacking on a side project for the past couple of weeks that I wanted to share: an open-source tool that lets me describe a piece of music in plain English and writes the full project onto the Circuit Tracks over USB — patterns, patches, FX, everything. Then I pick the unit up and jam with it normally.

Short demo, asked it for a short ambient drone piece:

🎧 Audio: https://namirsab.dev/media/teaching-claude-to-use-my-novation-circuit-tracks-part-2/CircuitMCPDemo.mp3

🎥 Video of the whole flow: https://namirsab.dev/media/teaching-claude-to-use-my-novation-circuit-tracks-part-2/CircuitMCPDemoVideo.mp4

That's a real ncs project loaded onto the device, not a DAW emulation. You can still tweak everything by hand afterwards.

How it works (short version)

- A Python library that speaks to the CT over USB/SysEx (the same protocol Novation Components uses)

- An MCP server layer on top, so any AI agent (Claude, Cursor, etc.) can call the tools

- The AI composes, the library writes, the CT plays

The hardest part was figuring out Novation's `.ncs` project format, which isn't publicly documented. I wrote up ~40 pages of protocol docs while reverse engineering it. This might be useful if anyone wants to build other CT tools.

Links

- Code (MIT): https://github.com/namirsab/circuit-tracks-tools

- Install: pip install circuit-tracks-tools[mcp]

- Blog writeup (3 parts, with the reverse engineering story): https://namirsab.dev/blog/teaching-claude-to-use-my-novation-circuit-tracks-part-1

Works on macOS and Windows, Python 3.11+.

Curious to hear from fellow CT owners:

- Does this sound useful or interesting to you?

- Any specific workflows you'd want it to cover?

Happy to answer questions, and if anyone tries it I'd love to hear what comes out.