I noticed a cool new pulsar VCO in the VCV Rack library. I love pulsar oscillators – they’re cool theoretically but also it’s just really easy to get lots of good sounds out of them. I spent some time noodling with it and thought it would be fun on the Meta. I have never ported anything before and I don’t know C++ at all, but I followed the porting instructions and after futzing with the CMake file for an hour I got it to work!
I emailed the developer and they were enthusiastic about a MetaModule version, so I’m sharing this here. I’ve only minimally tested it but it does seem to work. The only changes I made to the VCV version are I replaced the dark panels with the light one and commented out the “choose theme” menu options (they didn’t work on Meta).
@danngreen, the VCV Rack Adaptor is a really impressive piece of code. It’s wild how easy this was. I need to clean up the code and get it on Github before this goes in the library (it’s GPL-licensed) but if anyone wants to kick the tires first, please do let me know how it works for you.
Wow that module is beautifully nuts. I’d previously overlooked it in the VCV library not realizing it was a hardware clone, because it’s not tagged as such in the library. Thanks for taking a crack at the port, and reporting back how easy it was to do that. Will it be added to the official list of plugins soon?
I was still reeling from the Stargazer port and now this! What other Eurorack module gets exponentially better on a regular basis as MetaModule does? It’s amazing the work y’all have done and continue to do here. Thanks!
Thanks! It’s possible you heard about it yesterday because I posted about it on ModWiggler — I really like this module, it’s easy to get a lot of very usable sounds out of it.
There are good instructions here, but yeah, I ran into a bunch of gotchas. Maybe I’ll write the whole thing up at some point. But the high-level version is, follow those instructions and whenever you run into problems ask a large language model to explain it to you. (I used Perplexity — it gave me good advice and was aware of some MetaModule-specific stuff that I had missed, like the fact that you have to use a specific version of the ARM toolchain.)
I hope so. The original code is licensed with GPL-3, which basically means “this code is open-source, and anything you make with it has to be open-source too.” So I need to post my code publicly before submitting it to the library. But the only way I could get it to build was by hard-coding a path in the CMakeLists file — there’s a part where it says “/Users/gabrielroth/blah/blah/file.json”, and I can’t post the code that way. I tried using a relative path but I couldn’t get it to work. So that’s the next hurdle for me to get over before I can submit it to the library. I’ll look at some existing plugin code and see if I can figure it out. Any tips welcome from those who’ve been down this road before!
There’s an issue where the panel displays a bit too wide on the MM (described here) — happy to fix that before release if you’ll give me some pointers. [EDIT: Fixed in latest version — I didn’t know about the image conversion script but I do now.]
