Artiphon

Oh, and another thing - checking you haven't accidently broken the xml formatting is a good idea. There are online apps that will do this. I use https://codebeautify.org/xmlvalidator .

But some text editors for programming have a checker facility built in.

(Good advice that came from Subskybox, I think.)

Oh, and one last (hopefully) thought. If you can get all the chords you want from seven keys (with open chords you could get a full chromatic set) you could do worse than use the 8th to set a diminished triad (not the four note chords that guitarists, including me, refer to as diminished chords). With pitch bend you should get 2 chords that would substitute for 6 7th chords! Haven't worked out which to use - but that may depend on what keys you use most.

I have just realised that my presets using pitch bend rely on pitch bend being set at 100%. If you have loaded any of these and found they don't work as expected that's probably the reason. Just go to the settings page and set pitch bend to 100%. Alternatively, if you don't want to reset your pitch bend then you could change the numbers in the seeker entry in the preset. Sorry, but I can't tell you what numbers you would need though.

I have found when using pitch for sliding from one note to the other a circular motion on the key gives a better sound than a straight up and down motion a subtle difference but it works. (I will shortly post a new preset with a Chinese Zheng like sound - this works well with this.)

And finally, if you have one of these presets set when you are using Orbasynth it will respond to the pitch bend (on Windows at least), however this won't be included in any resulting preset you save from the app. You would have to tinker with the preset if you wanted pitch bend in the preset.

I would love a Kalimba preset as good as the piano ones.  Anyone think this is doable?  I tried the recording thing and it only produces the right sound on a computer so whats the point of the little ball lol?

The Grand Piano preset uses 96 samples, the Electric Piano 45. Recording with the Orba uses 1.

@David Benton

Hey David,

I downloaded the zip file you shared with us (DavidsOrbaPreset.zip) and I think you have an Orba-1.  I have an Orba-2 and only 2 or 3 worked.  The ones with sound samples did not work at all.  But I was able to sample the sounds one at a time and created presets that did work.

The ones without sound samples looked like they were created using OrbaSynth (which is not compatible with Orba-2).  If only Artiphon would have created a users manual or fix it so that OrbaSynth would work.

I wonder what bugs people are going to find in Chorda ;)

@SubSkyBox

Hi, does your python code work with Orba-2?

Thanks,

-j

@gerald rolon

Sorry you had problems with the presets - I hope you didn't try to load them all at once! I wouldn't recommend that.

I have only ever had an Orba 2 and all the presets in that collection were taken from my Orba 2 and were working. (I made a point of doing that to avoid accidently including any of my working attempts or other files that might have errors.)

I think you may have done something wrong. I can only give any suggestions based on using the app on Windows - I don't have experience of using Macs, ipads or android. It might help if we knew what system you are using.

First thing is -  it won't work if you just copied the whole lot into the Artiphon folder in one go.

In your Artiphon folder (in your User>Documents folder) the .artipreset files should go into the Common>Presets>Lead, Chords or Bass folder as appropriate (most are leads). The images (not actually vital, but the app uses them) should go into the Common>Images folder (although I have found sometimes they need to be copied into the C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Artiphon\Common\Images folder as well - don't know why that happens!) 

If the preset uses samples, the folder containing the samples needs to go into the Common>SamplePools folder.

The suggested method for loading each preset or group of presets is to merge the common folders in each individual folder of the collection and the Common folder in the Artiphon folder, which will put them in the right place, although I have a stubborn habit of doing it by copying them by hand myself.

Once the files are copied to the right places they should show up in the app and can then be loaded onto the Orba 2 - where there are samples they will take a bit more time to load.

Hope this helps.

@gerald rolon

I read your post again and had missed your comments about the samples - that seems very strange to me unless you did something odd with the files - Windows could possibly have done unwanted things if they were opened and saved again. (Although that seems unlikely.)

It wouldn't surprise me if Android or Apple OS's do their own things with peoples files.

Rather than re-sample sounds I would suggest double checking the properties of them - Windows apparently assumes that no-one would want to use 16bit audio anymore. I use a portable version of Audacity set up to use specifically for Orba stuff.

I have also had a suspicion that updates to the app may have introduced extra checks to the format of presets which led me to try slightly adjusting a couple of artipresets - but having loaded a bunch of my older presets successfully to a new Orba 2 recently I'm less convinced about that thought.

The SynthPatch in a preset are the same in both Orba 1 and 2, however the rest is different mostly because much of it is encoded in base64(? - I'm not that technically savvy) on the Orba 1. (You probably know that!)

I use Orbasynth to work on the SynthPatch only. The rest is all taken and adjusted from existing Orba 2 presets.

@gerald rolon

Oh, another thought came to mind - how are you unzipping the files? I habitually use 7zip for any archives -  perhaps other software for it does strange things to them? (Or perhaps 7zip does!)

@Devid Benton

I sampled the 16 sounds on my OLD Casio CZ-101 

16 Lead presets

1 Bass preset

(not very exciting, but...)

I used Windows 10 "Send To | Compressed (Zipped) Folder"

See if it works for you.

For those of you who are reading this and don't know where these files go...., they go here:

C:\Users\<Your User Name>\Documents

@Gerald Rolon

Thanks for that. 

I prefer to try and sample "real" instruments if I can - partly because that's what I want, and partly because most (perhaps all) of the Artiphon made ones use ready made sources from other synths so it feels like it's already been done! Where I have used synth samples it's because I've not been able to get recordings of an instrument or voice to get samples from.

It looks like you've used the presets created by sampling on the Orba as a model. That might not be the best approach, certainly not if you want the natural inconsistencies of a "real" instrument. I want them to be more natural in sound if I can. (Of course, I can't always achieve that.) I would use more samples in the pitch ranges that are actually used, though I now take trouble to try and keep the total size of the sample pool down, if I can, it also makes it less work.

I had one of the earliest Casio keyboards (MT100?) a long, long while ago and deeply regret having parted with it! There were sounds on it I wish I still had.

I should have said, those old school sounds of the Casio have got a charm of their own, I think. Well worth having in the collection.  I like the whistle sound in particular - I've been trying to make a natural sounding flute preset, but all the samples I can get ,or make, sound too harsh to my ears (as do samples for single violin or cello). Still trying to solve that one.

I added a "song" and a chord preset.

The song is "Lean on me"

NOTE: I have zero musical training/ability.

Remember, these files belong in:

C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents