Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

Sorry Gordon, I just read this and see you already know all about
Rainer's site.

 

John

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Gordon JC Pearce
MM3YEQ
Sent: 27 January 2009 09:28
To: Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Ensoniq-VFX-SD] Re: Sysex OS for SD-1

 

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 00:07 +0000, david.rodgers wrote:
> You mentioned FreeDOS, which got my attention. I've toyed with 
> FreeDOS but that's not why I posted.
> 
> Since mid 2007 I began phasing out (all) Microsoft products with the 
> operating system Ubuntu Linux 32-bit Desktop Edition.
> 
> Is there is a (specialized) Ensoniq/Ubuntu users group?

No, but I do use Ubuntu (among other Linux distros, and indeed other
non-Microsoft OSes).

> If not, would like to correspond with other Ensoniq/Ubuntu users 
> regarding software/hardware issues -and- interoperability between 
> MIDI synthesizers used for recording, sound editing and other audio 
> production projects in Ubuntu.

There's so many to choose from... I'm pretty heavily involved in the
Linux Audio scene. In fact, a lot of my spare time is taken up with
trying to get a bunch of audio plugins ready for their next release.

There's a bit of software called "EpsLin" which is surprisingly hard to
find, which will read and write EPS disk images so you can use .ede
and .efe files in Linux. I found it years ago on the 'net, but any site
that ever had it is long gone and the original author has proved
elusive. Since it's GPLed, we can redistribute it freely, so:
http://www.gjcp. <http://www.gjcp.net/~gordonjcp/EpsLin_v1.31.c>
net/~gordonjcp/EpsLin_v1.31.c

Go and redistribute it ;-) I made a couple of tweaks so it compiles
cleanly on newish versions of GCC, although previously it only choked on
a couple of odd line endings. Let this be a lesson to the closed-source
coders out there - if you disappear, your work very quickly becomes
useless and forgotten!

Rainer Buchty's Ensoniq pages have a lot of goodies:
http://www.buchty. <http://www.buchty.net/ensoniq/> net/ensoniq/

The SQ80 toolkit has proved useful for reading and writing Mirage
floppies. All you do is modify it so that it only reads side 0 of the
disk - not exactly hard to do. The real trick will be getting it to
*format* the disks. I haven't cracked that one yet.

I wrote some MIDI sample transfer utilities for the Mirage and EPS, but
they're nowhere near release quality yet - they're not even in public
SVN. I doubt I'll have time to get back to them before the end of
March, but I'll keep you all posted. For dumping patches on the VFX I
just use amidi. I'm sure there used to be a nice GUI-based generic
sysex manager, but I find command-line tools easier to work with anyway.

Finally, I'm working on a set of CC-licenced samples for the Mirage and
EPS. Again, other pressing commitments (like finding a job) are going
to keep these off the bench for a month or two, but you'll get to see
them when they're nearer to ready.

Gordon