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Orba hacking knowledge base

This thread is intended to gather the feedback of Orba tinkerers.


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@BJG145


Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of showing the notes, but the way the modifier actually works is a series of 4 relative offsets from the root note which comes from the scale notes (Major or Minor). For example, for Pad 1 in C Major the root note is C. Each chord has exactly 4 voices so the offsets for Chord/Pad 1 for the Major scale are [0,7,12,16] or [C,G,C,E]. For the C Minor chord they use [0,3,7,0] or [C,E♭,G,C]. Notice the 2 zeros in the Minor chord offsets. Two voices are playing the same note so it sounds like a 3 note chord.

I do have a dev version of the Chord Fiddler tool that allows to modify values outside of the Major/Minor character areas. I've messed with them and many of them cause the Orba to crash and have completely made the Chord Mode unusable. I elected not to release that since it could maybe brick someone's device. I was able to recover by loading a full song which appears to re-write all the required values back.

I would be careful with the Chord Fiddler that I've published. I've since learned that the way I change the characters is totally wrong. I am allowing the user to pick any ASCII values and this will lead to problems. Instead stick to the Base64 Character set which I now know is how it needs to be.


I'm planning to correct the Fiddler first as I think this might only need a few hours of work. But I have a good plan now for the Orba Virtual Piano which will include Chord buttons and will send the altered chord notes directly to the Orba so you can hear them as you adjust. This is going to take more work and may have to wait a bit.. My wife says I'm spending too much time with Orba :P


I also had another realization. If I change all the offsets to zeros (i.e. [0,0,0,0]), that will essentially play the same note four times. This could be used to set the scale of a regular sound like Bass or Lead. I tried this by dumping a Chord sound into the Bass Preset folder and it only plays one of the voices from the chords. Once I have the Fiddler updated, it could also work for regular voice scales! AND it would be able to be transposed not like the "percussion" hack that has been shared. I'll hopefully have some updates in the next week or two. 


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I don't know why I love Hall & Oates?! Here are the ManEater chords. Set Orba to B-minor then play Pads 3|2|4|1|6|7|5|8-7-8

image



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Please make up your mind, Artiphon. Update your software or hand it over.

"Depending on the vendor, end-of-life may differ from end of service life, which has the added distinction that a vendor of systems or software will no longer provide maintenance, troubleshooting or other support. Such software which is abandoned service-wise by the original developers is also called abandonware. Sometimes, software vendors hand over software on end-of-life, end-of-sale or end-of-service to the user community, to allow them to provide service and further upgrades themselves." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-life_product)


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So I've finally bit the bullet and got an Orba, immediately got annoyed by the lack of diatonic options for Lead voices, so I went ahead and copied every standard Lead voice and changed them to be diatonic. Archive with the .orbapreset files is attached, for anyone else interested (and those too lazy to do the work themselves :P)

Side Note; Did anyone else notice that the Lead voices respond to the bumping gesture with a  2-octaves-lowered D-note? 

zip

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I don't know if someone has a use for this: Orba + Chill presets with fixed 32 bars instead of maximum 8 bars.

And I don't know if there is a maximum of fixed bars or if it hurts your Orba. 

Open song in a texteditor. Search and replace the value after "nBars="

song
(45.8 KB)

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Interesting rewrite of the XML format. It looks more readable now, comparing eg the old Ambeeant Seeker Entry.


Then...


<SeekerEntry seekerData="AQEAAAgAgRQAAwEBAQEAAAAAAAD/fwAAfwAAAA==" seekerUuid="64358c1f-2ef5-4fd0-b3fd-ad8c4f93b839"

uuid="b827a749931a42a78351cbaf6948f5b4"/>


Now...


 <SeekerEntry inputLength="Default" inMin="0" inMax="1" outMin="0" outMax="127"

seekerType="Controller" controller="Aftertouch" triggerSource="Default Note Source"

triggerRule="Source" metricSensor="Default Note Source" metricSelection="MPE Z"

maxRate="20"/>


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More Presets!! 7th chords rule!


Couldn't believe it when I found the 7th chords option, but only for one patch... Those 7th chords sound nice! A quick diff between the 7th chords.orbapreset and others, shows that the only noticeable differences exist in the <ModifierList> and <SeekerList> entries - while I can't decipher any of the actual contents, simply swapping out the entire ModifierList and SeekerList from the 7th chords preset to other presets puts them into 7th chord mode!

Once again, an archive with all stock chord presets as 7th chords is attached. I've also included 'Normal Chords.orbapreset' which is the stock 7th chords preset, but modified to use the standard chord layout.

zip

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"Orbacam is available for iOS from the Apple App Store."

I don't understand why Artiphon spends time on applications like "Orbacam" - iOS only(!) and ignores basic feature requests.

They should go open-source...

 


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Just received my Orba 2 this afternoon! I will see if the tools work with Orba 2 in the next week or so. We should probably start an Orba 2 Hacking forum.


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Also, I just wanna share another thread I started which led to a fruitful discussion.

Have a look https://artiphon.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/44001013186


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@Steve


Yeah I agree that I should make a new Topic for the tool(s). I'm just not sure what the scope should be just yet. The tools are going to lead to new discoveries which will lead back here. I guess I just need to be selective with what I post and where. I can see there will be questions on how to use, troubleshooting, bugs and people might want to share chords they've made. That could be an Orba Fiddler topic. Is there already a tools topic? I thought I saw someone post a synth voice editor in here a while back?


As for OrbaDeployDaemon.ps1, PowerShell should be included with Windows (which is why I selected it). I never tested for non-admin users. Try typing 'Powershell' in the Windows search bar and see if it comes up? If you can launch a shell window, I think you'll be able to run it. There are many things that could be going wrong so maybe have a look at this https://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/powershell-scripts-faq-tips-and-tricks.htm


It would be great if you'd like to help with documentation once you work through how to launch the script.


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@BJG145


I like your ideas for the "Note Fiddler".. At this point I'm going to stop any development on the Chord Fiddler and start working on bringing this functionality into Orba Virtual Piano. If you noticed, the Virtual Piano can sense what mode you're in (Drum, Bass, Chord, Lead) so I imagine I'll have a section underneath that is the editor portion for that mode. I may never get to drums, especially now that Orba 2 is coming. Bass is monophonic so editing the scale is straightforward. I like the Dorian scale you shared above (this confirms it can be done). There are a few places where the mode can be set in the .orbapreset file and messing with those may correct the phasing effect you describe. As for the Lead mode (which is polyphonic), I can see why it accepts all 4 voices even if they are the same. Maybe the remaining characters in the ModifierData string control turning the voices on/off. Who knows. I can quite easily make a version of this that supports the whole string. More on this later. I'd love your help trying to see what they control. There are obvious indexes where there are values that seem deliberate. I think one might control the scale mode. That's a theory I have from messing with these values with the old Fiddler, but the new version will correctly target the values. 


I just created a new Topic: Orba Utilities to continue this conversation.


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Here's the 16 semitones that I was imagining. NOTE: Orba App must have Pitch Bend Scaling at 25%.


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Just had an epiphany.. What if you change the weird dual-note voice to be a semitone up (not sure this is possible.. I think it starts at 2 semitones.. Maybe using Pitch settings at 50% in the App). Once you have that, combine with your whole tone scale. This should give 16 consecutive semitones without even tilting?!


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Furthermore, I've looked into switching out presets for the Android App - this can be accomplished by copying the relevant .orbapreset files to  

/data/data/com.artiphon.orba/Artiphon/Orba/Presets/

 Since this is not a normal user-writable partition however, root permissions are required

As a workaround,
you could load up the modified presets onto your Orba using a PC, then save a new Song on your Android (or probably also iPhone) device. This will save an entire song with Drums, Base, Chords and Lead everytime, but it also includes the modified diatonic Lead voice.


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