[LAU] hardware synth editor

[Sebastian Gutsfeld]

Hi Atte,

Atte André Jensen <atte.jensen at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm thinking seriously about getting an Alesis Micron. But I understand
> they are a pain to program, so I'm looking for an editor software.
>
> I looked at jsynthlib, and it seems it should be possible to write a
> driver for the Micron. However the project seems a little (or more)
> dead. What software do you guys use to edit your hardware synths?

The problem is Alesis' MIDI specification for the Ion/Micron is still
not publicly available.

I think you have three options:

Hack Micronizer: http://mrbook.org/micronizer

Connect your Micron to your computer and use aseqdump or something like
that to check which parameter corresponds to which MIDI message or join
the alesis-ion Yahoo group to get most of the MIDI specs from the files
section
(http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/alesis-ion/files/Documentations/ and
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/alesis-ion/files/midi%20and%20sysex%20info/).
Then prototype your custom Micron GUI in Pd, Python or whatever.

Download the Program Decoder from Alesis
(http://alesis.com/downloads/software/Ion/Ion_ProgramDecoder_v100.zip).
This Perl script encodes patches defined in text files to Ion/Micron
sysex files and vice versa. Maybe you can program a quick GUI to edit
those patch text files and an automatic transfer to your synth if the
underlying text file changed.

I've also build a rudimentary MusE instrument definition file for my
Ion. If it's still not included in the official MusE release it's at
least in the CVS repository.

regards,
   Sebastian

PS: Or you could buy an Ion instead of a Micron ;)