px.factory 1.0 - Java Librarian for the Prophet X

[Derek Cook]

       

Hello all.

I'm pleased to announce a new Librarian in my x.factory librarian family.

px.factory is for the fantastic Sequential Prophet X synthesizer.

I've only had the Prophet X for a few months, but quickly decided to write a librarian as (bias alert!) I prefer my librarian features and workflow.

This software is not an editor (you have a lovely front panel on the Prophet X for that ) but a means of storing and organising your programs and playlists.

For example,

• You can use drag and drop to organise your programs and the play list will be updated automatically.
• You can drag a play list to a new file, and any referenced programs are copied as well.
• You can drag program banks about to change their order (Play Lists are updated).
• You can renumber banks (Play Lists are updated.

This first version 1.0 release supports MIDI transfer and SYSEX file management, The program library feature along with other features (such as remapping of sample banks) will be added in later releases. Also at present I am only supporting the User Program Banks, but happy to look at extending this to cover the other banks, once I understand what you can and can't do with them a little better. I understand that F banks are read only, but not sure what you can do with the A banks.

You can download this new librarian from the the x.factory Librarians web site.

I sell these librarians for the modest cost of £20 GBP to help cover my development costs (most tools these days are subscription based), and to get a small return on the many hours spent on them. A license is needed to unlock file save and MIDI export. Other than that the unregistered software is functional to allow its evaluation. You can load files and import from MIDI to get data in for evaluation of the librarian features

I do however recognise, that there is an altruistic community here supporting the Prophet X, with many tools and sounds available for free. Therefore, I am happy to provide free licenses to those people who are making free contributions to the community. If you fall into that category and would like a free px.factory license then please PM me.

Note: there appears to be an issue with using USB MIDI on OSX (possibly also on PC but definitely more prevalent on OS X) when the Prophet is also sending NRPN data on the same USB port, which can cause MIDI reception within the synth's USB communications to hang until you either turn the synth off and then back on, or unplug and replug in the USB cable. If you turn "MIDI Param Send" in Global Mode to either OFF or CC during data transfers to the synth then there appears to be no issues. I will report this issue to Sequential

By way of background, I have been writing utilities for my synthesizers for nearly 20 years now, starting with ex.factory for the Yamaha EX5. The x.factory series of librarians grew out of some of the frustrations I had with doing certain things on my Yamaha EX5 synthesiser, which I bought in late 1999. Whilst most editing on the EX5 was fairly easy from the front panel, certain things were either very hard or very tedious to do (or both!) on the synth itself. For example, changing voices that used custom waves to reference the custom waves in either DRAM memory of FLASH memory. This prompted me to write a tool to do this "remapping" automatically. Following this, my next frustration was that there was no simple way to change the organisation of voices and performances in memory (e.g. to match a gig's running order), and if you did move voices the hard way then any performances referencing these voices had to be manually edited to ensure they still referenced the correct voices. So I wanted a librarian that would allow me to move things around without references getting lost. I couldn't find such a thing for the EX5, so I decided to write my own, and ex.factory was born.

I write the librarians in Java so that they are cross platform. I develop on OS X, but also run and test on PC (Windows 10). They also run on Linux.

[Lady Gaia]

I look forward to getting a chance to try this out, Derek, when I return home in another week or so.  Thank you for acknowledging the community spirit of those who have donated their time and creations to other owners.

[Derek Cook]

I look forward to getting a chance to try this out, Derek, when I return home in another week or so.  Thank you for acknowledging the community spirit of those who have donated their time and creations to other owners.

Thanks, Lady G. I only hang out in friendly forums, and this is one of them. As I have benefited from the free stuff available here, then I felt I should give something back to others giving their items away, but without disrupting my own general business model too much. Offering the free licenses to other contributors seems the best way.

BTW, I am also quite open to feature suggestions.

[Shaw]

I look forward to getting a chance to try this out, Derek, when I return home in another week or so.  Thank you for acknowledging the community spirit of those who have donated their time and creations to other owners.

Thanks, Lady G. I only hang out in friendly forums, and this is one of them. As I have benefited from the free stuff available here, then I felt I should give something back to others giving their items away, but without disrupting my own general business model too much. Offering the free licenses to other contributors seems the best way.

BTW, I am also quite open to feature suggestions.

That looks like that took you a good bit of time. And it looks like a very valuable tool indeed. Many thanks! I’m sure many in the community will appreciate this greatly. 

[Derek Cook]

Thanks, Shaw.

It took about six weeks on and off (mostly off)! Obviously it is based a lot on common framework code with my other librarians, which helps a lot. Even where I need specific code for the Prophet, it is based on very common design patterns which I borrow and adapt from the other librarians. For example the program bank renumbering and reordering is "borrowed" from kronos.factory for the Kronos as it has a similar flexible bank structure.