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Instrument definitons

Posted

Hello all,

Although I've owned Synfire Pro for about six years, I really haven't had time to do much with it - career change, moving to a different state, work, etc - but all that's about to change as I will be retiring in a couple of months and hope to devote much more time to my music hobby.  I've been building my studio for the past 20 years in anticipation.

My first question is regarding setting up Instrument definitions.

I have quite a few VST instruments, from Cakewalk (Dimension Pro, Raptor, Z3TA+, etc) and I'm a big fan of Spectrasonics (Omnisphere 2, Trilian, Sylus RMX) - all of which I'd like to use in Synfire.

I was able to install the Omisphere definition that Leonard provided and it seems to work fine.

I was wondering how these definitions are created and how I can learn more about writing my own versions - hopefully including all of the patch information, controller options, etc.

If this topic is too big for the forum, I'd be happy to discuss it via email.

I look forward to participating in this forum and to contributing when I have more experience.

Thanks,
Frederick

 

 


Thu, 2016-07-07 - 21:18 Permalink

Hello Frederick,

Welcome to the user forum!

Creating a device description does not actually require you to "write" one. Just set it up using Synfire's user interface and save it. This basically boils down to adding channels and sounds (multiple selectable programs organized in banks, or one fixed sound per channel) and make a few settings on the "Properties" tab in the "Device Descriptions" section.

There are tutorial videos showing how this works: This one shows a simple one sound-per-channel setup:

(http://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/setup-global-rack-and-global-instru…)

If your device supports a list of selectable patches ("programs"), extraction may work. Otherwise you'll need to get that list of sounds from elsewhere and import it from a text file, for example:

(http://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/creating-device-description-extract…)

Hope this helps you get started.

Fri, 2016-07-08 - 06:30 Permalink

Thanks Andre,

I've basically got everything working - apparently, none of my VSTs have patch lists that can be extracted, but it works just fine by selecting the patch from the synth interface inself.  I was probably trying to make it more complicated than need be.

Lots to learn, but I keep at it!