Artiphon

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

@ Roger - Not sure if this means anything.

I loaded a preset in the editor and saved it without editing anything. After that the picture didn't show in the Orba app; it was replaced by a generic Orba pic. In the editor it showed the original pic. After a compare in a texteditor I noticed a small difference.

In the original file there is a line ending and some whitespace before 'CoverImageHash'. Maybe that keeps the Orba app from displaying the right pic.

By the way, if you save a number with the old Windows app, you can choose a new pic. After that, the file contains the pic data with uuid / coverimagehash. That data can be transferred via copy / paste to other files, such as a preset. Not very practical, but it is possible.

PS I tried inserting a line ending + whitespace via editing XML in the editor. That didn't work; after saving the file the insertion was gone.

Thanks GJ. The editor is processing the image data (even though not changed) I just removed the ability to swap the image out. I’ll may remove the image processing as well if I cannot get the uuid and cover image hash to work.

The latest desktop/mobile app version allows songs to be saved again. I recorded a simple 4 bar drum loop and saved it so I could see how the loops are stored in the song XML. There is a section called LoopData that contains base64 encoded event data:

I need to save a couple of different drum loops and compare the results. Here's what my first attempt looks like:

00000000: 10a4 0326 6144 4c00 10cf 0324 5e2b 5600  ...&aDL....$^+V.
00000010: 10be 0326 3f2d 4d00 10cc 0324 6a32 5300  ...&?-M....$j2S.
00000020: 10bb 0326 5931 4900 10b1 0324 5435 5700  ...&Y1I....$T5W.
00000030: 109d 0326 4c32 4300 10b1 0324 7146 6a00  ...&L2C....$qFj.

Forgot to mention that there is one LoopData section for each Mode (drums, bass, chord, lead).

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="

Could it be, that the new firmware update changed the tunings? 

My diatonic presets all sound really weird now, and the standard presets sound weird whenever I press the 3rd button.

@Bogenregner - Nice to know, thank you.

The Orba stops recording  after 8 bars. That could give a result of minutes if you decrease BPM to something like 10 instead of 120. I found this for calculations.

But maybe there are users who have 8 bars at the tempo they like and want it to be longer. In stead of decreasing BPM and re-recording they can simply add some bars.

Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious ;-)   

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? 

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.

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.

I am so happy that this thread found the interest of many Orba users there.

I wish I had more time myself to fiddle with it. 

Great job. Keep going!

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