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:
🎥 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.