Koan is a generative music system that was initially conceived in 1990 by SSEYO (a company founded by Tim and Pete Cole a long time ago). Koan and the Koan Pro authoring tool are no longer available, but Intermorphic has acquired the rights to them.

Noatikl is a brand new generative music engine, and what Intermorphic has done is to try very hard to make Noatikl a product that users of the old Koan system will come to love. We have also figured-out an easy way to get a lot of your old Koan data into Noatikl, to help you get started with Noatikl.

How do I get data from Koan Pro into Noatikl??

This uses one of the very earliest features of Koan Pro, where you can export a Koan file in as a text file listing that you could inspect at your leisure. This comes from the early days (before Koan really had a user interface!) when Koan files used to be plain text files that you edited by hand.

To get your old files from Koan Pro into Noatikl:

1. Using Koan Pro, open-up the file you want to use in Noatikl (e.g. MYTHOUS.SKD)
2. Save the file as a text file (e.g. mythous.txt) using the File -> Create Text File Listing menu item.
3. Using Noatikl, open-up the text file (e.g. mythous.txt) that you saved in the previous step.
4. Try playing the file using noatikl. It should sound pretty close to the original (but not identical!).
5. Save your file from Noatikl, as mythous.noatikl. You can now re-edit the file using Noatikl, at your leisure!

How does this work?

The Text File Listings that can be exported by Koan Pro were designed to be used by anybody who wanted to get their head around the many parameters used by the old Koan music engine. This made it very easy for us to write code that allowed Noatikl to scan the text fields in the text file listing, and import that data into the Noatikl engine.

Of course, the Noatikl engine is totally unrelated to the old Koan engine, so while we do our best to render old Koan data through Noatikl, what you hear won't sound absolutely identical to how it used to sound. For example, Noatikl doesn't support various features that were in Koan Pro, such as software synthesis. Also, the Noatikl music engine is based on completely different code to that used in Koan, and that inevitably makes things sound different.

There is also no way to get data from Noatikl back into Koan Pro. Though we're not sure why you'd want to try that anyhow!