Artiphon

Anyone a Kalimba fan? would be OVER THE MOON if someone made something like that. I am unskilled in all things music, let alone the coding so i'm just hoping to spark someone's ich for a Kalimba lead.

@Daniel Miller - I saw your post to Subskybox about a bass preset that wouldn't load. I had a look at it and altered a couple of things that I thought might have stopped it working. I renamed it a gave it a picture of my own because I wasn't sure about the one in his version. Hope he doesn't mind! He's helped me getting mine working so I had repaying his effort with my own in mind.

I might try and see if I can make it work using the position on the key change the pitch instead of tilt which I think might be better to use. If so, it will get posted here, of course.

@Daniel Miller -  regarding Kalimba's - and some other instruments - they can be difficult to make presets from. A while ago I tried with samples I made from two thumb pianos I had around the house. One I simply couldn't work with at all and the other has problems. I suspect that the initial hit of the note, which is part of the character of these instruments, is what sent the Orba a bit crazy with glitchy noises. But the many overtones also make it hard to get pitches right. Bells and metal pan instruments can present similar difficulties.

I have now created a library of all the presets I have put together. TheLead presets are mostly for diatonic major but some also have pentatonic and even chromatic versions.  The majority are synth based so take up little space, but a few are sample based and use up rather more space.

The whole kaboodle is 108Mb so I have posted it to Mediafire at:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/2v1ri7cej2mh4cv/DavidsOrba2Presets.zip/file

If you were crazy enough to install all of them they would take up much less space than the 108Mb of the whole library on your Orba 2. This is because I have packaged them to make it easier to pick and choose what you might load. This means there is a lot of duplication of image files and samples.

These are all the ones I have loaded on my Orba 2 - a few are very similar, perhaps even the same as others and some are presets that I wasn't entirely happy with. So do with them as you will.

It should be possible to delete all the presets if not wanted, but bear in mind the samples don't get deleted with the associated preset and will remain on your Orba.

@meow - 

Thank you, but I'm retired and am happy to stay that way. Glad to be of help though.

@meow

What we could really do with is an Orbasynth app that works with the Orba 2. It won't help much with gestures  when working on a Windows pc  though - for that, we at least need a bit more information on the seeker entries in the presets.

(By the way, if you have even a basic knowledge of Html you can get to grips with xml - the format used for the presets - quite easily. The other things to watch out for  are a few simple things that need to be done and it is not too hard to start making or modifying presets. Much of that is discussed in the hacking thread - looking at the Orba 1 hacking thread is also useful.)

I think it may be possible to do more and better with the drum presets (in ways that might suit you) but I can't quite work all that out yet.

@HisMajestyBentonAkaTheOracleOfOrba

So, wait, I bought this thing to make music without having to deal with a bunch of steps inbetween, you know, just keep this weird ball in my pocket and just do lets say 80s feature set of samping. I was not expecting much. But man is this thing software wise made really oddly.

Like why cant I manually change the midi notes to what i want? it even has a plus and minus button. just so many things i dont understand.

So anyway, now im sad, and ontop of this you want me to work?

haha btw the presets you made are really fun. playing around with them sometimes generates sound that makes no sense but thats kind of why i got it to begin with, so thanks for allowing the device to make new sound due to the octave up and down gestures and chromatic scale.

chromatic scale was really all i needed. i can loop and layer over what i need and pitch the octave up properly or via gesture for spotanious fun. im not joking when i say you made this thing useful.

so im not going to lie, i was pretty stoned and the zip you have says some files are missing when i import them. pretty sure i did what it says in your documentation but im gonna guess i did something wrong?

there are no pictures of your instruments. 

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Bass>Bluecello

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Chord>Bladechords

Artiphone>Common>Presets>Lead>Brazil

This is what it looks like.

Also am I understanding it correctly that its not possible to revert/factory reset? (that would be funny)

I do know html and xml, and the xml part is exactly why i am so happy you have done, what you have done. xml makes me cry.

The Orba1 and Orba2 being so different is so weird. and Orba2 not being backwards compatible is just a strong sign to me that these devices are not really for me. Because i promise you they will change some api at some point and all your presets will require a converter or something. (Murphys Law)

Could you outline for me what the possibilities I would have if I was to sit down and read the spec for the device? I have worked with supercollider3 and other sound synths and I kind know my way around midi, so a high level outline is fine. I just wanna know what I can expect.

What is the company actually doing? Those stem things are useless because the audio is copyrighted... Just terrible use of time unless they are getting something for it.

Ok I might add these forums to my WC-Reading-List and get up to date and maybe become helpful.

But again! Thank for your work (and everybody else who have contributed), im still so confused why somebody creates a sampler and does not include a microphone. how does that even make sense. is that not the first thing you need to sample? i am so disapointed.

ok nevermind, so if anyone else has the issue i had, my solution was to move the files to the public user documents folder (on windorks).

now it looks all pretty.

I am looking into the documents you suggested, I need a 6th diminished scale or the ability to diminish or augment with a gesture or something. pentatonic jazz gets boring real quick unless you have miles davis type skills which i dont.

@Ignis32

 tell me more about this sf2 converter you made? sounds amazing. does it work on drums? i really want to create my own drumkits.

@Subskybox

Which editor are you using? I think it would be a pretty cool thing if there was a vscode (or whatever) extension. It could make all the really annoying things ok to deal with.

im a noob at this and ive not read all the documentation to feel free to get annoyed at my dumb questions, but i was wondering. there is this guy who made cool orbapreset files for tunings and scales. is it possible to get them to work in orba2? i know orba2 uses artipreset files.

could you kinda explain to me how orba1 and 2 are different? is the sound engine different? the hardware and software honestly confuses me :) is orba1 actually not using samples at all and running a percussion synth? thats silly.

@meow

There's a lot of questions there which would probably be better to deal with in seperate threads.

However:

First - the missing files. They should be there in the zip file. There are two types of preset, those that use the built in synth and others that use samples. (Drum presets can actually use both - but that's a different story.) For synth based preset two files are required, for sample based there are also the samples (in their own folder) are required. The images and samples get loaded into "This PC > Documents > Artiphon > Common > Images" and the samples in the "SamplePools > User" folder. Check that the files from each preset required are in their proper place - if not, just copy them over from my collection.

(Images and Samples can be shared and used by different presets - so once they have been put in place they don't need to be reloaded, and they may not have the same name as the preset.) If there really are any missing I will upload those here.

I have found that sometimes Images don't show up in the app (they don't get saved on the Orba itself). Sometimes they magically appear later, occassionally not. However you could try putting them in "This PC > OS(C:) > Users > Public > Public Documents > Artiphon > Common > Images" - It usually cures this issue for Images. Doesn't work for samples.

Second - Artiphon aimed the Orbas to be instruments that could be used to create music with little or no musiscal knowledge. I feel this is well-meaning but a flawed and short-sighted philosophy - it's a too common type of thinking in the music tech industry and the tech industry in general in my opinion. It does mean that it has been rather locked down in some respects and which we have not found ways past. That is rather frustrating but I sort of enjoy doing what I can.

I only opted to buy an Orba when I had learnt that I could bend the rules as it were so I got what I expected largely.

One thing that has been frustrating people is that it is locked down to Major and Minor scales. There is a very compromised and limited workaound to create different scales - but it involves making a chord preset which plays two octaves of a note instead of a chord which can be forced into the required scale in the chord modifier section of the preset.

Changing octaves wasn't something I did - that's built into the Orba already!

Although the presets are in xml it's not really like xml as it's normally used, I think, otherwise I'd find it too painful!

I was going to say that with the chromatic type presets you can play the other types of scales - but you have to practice! And that goes back to my comment about the philosophy - the arts in general require learning and effort to be really good!

(While writing this I've seen you're other posts, and see you've been looking through previous posts here - so I won't try and regurgitate any more of what has already been said.)

@meow

>>  tell me more about this sf2 converter you made? sounds amazing. does it work on drums? 

 >> really want to create my own drumkits.

All code that I wrote on that topic so far  is located here:

https://github.com/ignis32/Sf2toOrba2

It is a bunch of python scripts, which utilizes sf2 parsing library, and my own code to parse orba2 artipreset files  and append it with converted  samples from sf2. It works for some extent for some sf2 stuff, and I'd made some orba presets with this tool, but due to lack of documentation is unlikely to be used by somebody who is not a developer, as  it is in an alpha-state mess.

Amount of the edge cases with sf2 and orba2 format exceeded my enthusiasm at some point, especially considering that I see no progress with the orba itself and it's buggy software. Artiphon does not fix reported bugs, does not communicate,  app is still unstable, only thing signs of life that I see is marketing stems stuff which I do not find entertaining or useful. Right now it feels like working on  these scripts is investing time into a dead product, so I am applying myself to other project and do not plan to improve anything for now.  ( If they would release OrbaSynth2 it probably would be interesting again for me)

Therefore if you are a python developer, I hope you can find some inspiration in my spaghetti code, otherwise I am afraid it is too far from being ready for primetime for you to benefit from it.