Discussion
300 synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app
import: Very cool project. I am impressed by the ability of the different format downloads like Hapax. Kudos!
Lio: This looks like a really great project.I naively thought that with 300ish synths covered they'd have everything I own but I can see that's not the case.I've got Alesis, Casio and Yamaha equipment that's missing. Time to dig out the manuals and get a PR ready.It's easy to forget how successful the MIDI standard is. It might be the most stable and still relevant digital standard of all time.My oldest bit of kit is a Casio CZ-5000 from, I think, 1985. That I can plug it into the latest equipment without drivers and it still works is amazing. 5 pin DIN for the win!
jamesjolliffe: OK, call me too synth nerdy, but have you guys ever longed for a project that allowed you too match stuff like envelope times and between synths?E.g. (totally made up values in this example) if you want to approximate the amplitude envelope from SH-101 to Bass Station 2, if the attack knob is at 5/10 position on 101, that's 500ms, which means you need to set attack knob to 6/10 on Bass Station 2 to get same attack time?I hope this gets made one day, but I'm too poor and stupid to make it.Anyways, this sort of system would make it much easier to create "universal" patches that would work between synths.
ErroneousBosh: > OK, call me too synth nerdy, but have you guys ever longed for a project that allowed you too match stuff like envelope times and between synths?Yes actually. I thought about doing something like this to convert Juno 106 patches to Novation Xiosynth patches, because I have a 106 and a Xiosynth 49 sitting beside me, and a pretty viable Juno 106 emulation.Getting the times for the Juno is easy because the lookup tables and code for the envelope is a known quantity but I'd need to actually just measure the envelopes in the Xio. They might also not have quite the same response "shape" but they'd be pretty close.
ductionist: That's an interesting idea. We've had a couple of requests to expand the format to include a mapping function between the CC/NRPN values and the 'display' values, e.g. [0, 127] -> [-10, 10], for cases where the relationship is nonlinear. This wouldn't guarantee normalization of meaning (it wouldn't encode the difference between the SH-101's attack and the Bass Station 2's attack), but it would make it easier to pull everything together in an app.
pgwalsh: Thanks! I have never heard of it. Need to buy my son a new ipad so I can use this with his old one.
ductionist: Hah! I hope it's worth the expense. Check out the Condukt discord when you get it going, lots happening in there.
ductionist: Hey thanks. I love the MIDI standard for exactly this reason too. Blows my mind that you can hook a forty year old synth up to a computer or iPad without drivers.
rigonkulous: Synth nerds got it right: open specs, and a general industry-wide desire to make things play well together. After all, its music, this is why music works in the first place..
ductionist: Totally, and I think the need for MIDI Guide - the fact that MIDI CC/NRPN is pretty much a free-for-all - is also why the spec has such staying power. It's so unopinionated that it imposes essentially zero constraints beyond message size. I love it.
luckymate: It might just reignite my lost love for Analog Four that's been collecting dust for good few years. There's just too much menu digging there, even though sequencer is super fun. Will surely check it out.
