KVR Audio

Kriminal · Post by **Kriminal** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:48 am

Maybe you should do it in your spare time, and when you have something to show, then start the kickstarter.

malphuncous · Post by **malphuncous** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:52 am

I made a first attempt at contacting Creative about licensing. I'll make further inquiries at a more reasonable time of day, and I'll update the kickstarter to reflect any response from them.

malphuncous · Post by **malphuncous** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:55 am

Kriminal! I have and love some of your sounds, if I'm not mistaken! Thank you for the input. That seems to be the consensus opinion. I will keep at it and try to post some technical updates soon.

electro · Post by **electro** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 4:40 pm

I think you should start out with smaller goals. First a VSTI with complete remote control over ASR parameters like the Dexed bank librarian manager for the DX7. That would help anybody with a broken unit (collapsed buttons for example) to have full sysex remote control over the unit.

Stage 2 would be to add the EPS sound engine and 2 way sample transmission via standard SCSI to usb adapter, then stage 3 would be to clone the DAC and DP2 board.

malphuncous · Post by **malphuncous** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:42 pm

I'm not sure what the technical relevance would be to writing a remote controller/librarian for the hardware units. Sounds like a completely different project.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:55 pm

malphuncous wrote: There are free, open-source libraries which are compatible with commercial re-use through the GPL, for example.

Just for the record, although there's nothing stopping you using GPL'd code for a commercial product, you would need to release your source code, for your whole project(*).

If you do not wish to share your source code, you will not be able to leverage GPL'd code. (LGPL'd code, however, would be okay).

(* The fact that you cannot legally redistribute the source code from Steinberg's VST SDK is potentially an issue wrt to that, btw)

syntheticillusion · Post by **syntheticillusion** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 8:00 pm

malphuncous wrote:I'm not sure what the technical relevance would be to writing a remote controller/librarian for the hardware units. Sounds like a completely different project.

I think he means the ability to swipe the samples from the hardware into the VST Plugin,
how far along are you on the converters? I would like to be an alpha tester but I don't have
the original hardware so I can't be one....how are you doing the graphical user interface?
are you doing it yourself or are you getting someone to do this for you, I would like it to
be able to read and write img files from floppys or omniflop/teledisk images so people can
converter their old floppy images to the plugins native format, that's another thing I wanted
to know is the sample format going to have it's own extenstion like .dp4 or something like
that because I like samplers with their own format like sampletank and emulator 3x.

malphuncous · Post by **malphuncous** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 8:19 pm

I'll likely do the GUI in Juce, also. I might get an artist to do the bitmaps, but other than that, writing the GUI is pretty trivial. Currently working on the ESP2 simulator without a gui, as I'm just passing machine instructions to it.

The plugin will not have its own sample format, initially. It's just going to load disk images from the original.

I guess I wasn't anticipating all this concern about the plug being difficult to write. I'm guessing mostly non-coders are having these worries? This isn't rocket science. lol It's emulating a decades old computer with a floppy drive.

BDeep · Post by **BDeep** » Thu Apr 23, 2015 9:33 pm

malphuncous wrote:I guess I wasn't anticipating all this concern about the plug being difficult to write. I'm guessing mostly non-coders are having these worries? This isn't rocket science. lol It's emulating a decades old computer with a floppy drive.

Don't take it personally though, as avid plugin users, we've had our fair share of disappointments regarding plugin development.

But then on the receiving end; waiting forever for promised updates which get postponed again and again.
Of course, that's not necessarily the rule, but no exception either.

electro · Post by **electro** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 2:00 am

syntheticillusion wrote:
malphuncous wrote:I'm not sure what the technical relevance would be to writing a remote controller/librarian for the hardware units. Sounds like a completely different project.
I think he means the ability to swipe the samples from the hardware into the VST Plugin.

I meant Fully controlling the ASR/EPS from the VSTI. This is one good example.
https://www.mysteryislands-music.com/pr ... r-plug-in/

Steinberg Wavelab and Propellerheads Recycle 1.x are able to send samples to the EPS/ASR over MIDI, but it is extremely slow.

deastman · Post by **deastman** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 4:57 am

Actually, you're talking to a number of other coders in this conversation. I think it is precisely because we do know how much effort goes into a project like this that we have reservations.

That said, I appreciate your positive attitude and I'll be following your progress closely.

I could help with the GUI if time permits, and there are a number of other graphics people around here as well.

robotmonkey · Post by **robotmonkey** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 7:42 am

Even though I very much would like this project to succeed I'm not full of optimism. Some obvious thing have already pointed out.

First, I would not hold my breath getting any answer from Creative Labs. I know some developers have tried to contact them before and have received no answer at all. And even if they answer I'm not sure it will be a positive one. Creative has gone downhill for several years and they are showing classic symptoms of company ruined by bad management. It seems that as their desperation grows they are more starting to monetize on their patents and trademarks, so they might not be happy at all allowing random developers to use any of their stuff.

Second, like others have said, I'm a bit skeptical about your prognosis of timeframe and the difficulty of emulating it to the exact level as the original hardware. Obviously this can be done, as Korg Legacy shows, for example. But I would start out with a single project - maybe DP4+ Pro emulation - first, and then do another kickstarter for the synths.

And third, pleas please do not design the GUI yourself but ask someone with some good design skills to do it. A butt-ugly GUI is completely off-putting and would kill the plugin instantly for me.

penguinfromdeep · Post by **penguinfromdeep** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 8:08 am

I thought making emulators and reverse engineering was quite difficult? Not exactly maybe rocket science but not easy either ... Well maybe writing a plug-in emulating some old piece of hardware is easier than making say Playstation 3 emulator

electro · Post by **electro** » Sat Apr 25, 2015 1:59 pm

penguinfromdeep wrote:I thought making emulators and reverse engineering was quite difficult? Not exactly maybe rocket science but not easy either ... Well maybe writing a plug-in emulating some old piece of hardware is easier than making say Playstation 3 emulator

He needs to start with achieving full remote control of all parameters and submenus on the hardware like the example I posted above. Emulating the internal circuitry and duplicating the sound engine and should come way later.

derek · Post by **derek** » Sun Apr 26, 2015 10:21 pm

if i may chime in for a moment:

early backer of the project here. i would very much love to see this become a reality. a couple of thoughts about what has been said here:

- regarding the rights: i doubt creative labs even has those old ensoniq products on their radar in any meaningful way. they didnt even care much about it back then (i witnessed the aquisition from a somewhat insider-ish perspective), their primary goal was to get the ensoniq audio PCI card out of the market (the soundblasters had yet to make the jump to PCI) and aquire the knowledge behind its PCI implementation. anything from the ensoniq pro audio line, they were clearly not interested in at all. they put that part of their purchase into the hands of ensoniqs longtime arch enemy emu, who then proceeded to "merge" with ensoniq in the sense that all things ensoniq had to go and all things emu stayed. what a sad story that was.

having said that: theres a pretty good chance that one could look at this old stuff as "abandonware". of course i could be wrong about this, but i see absolutely no indication for creative giving a **** about ensoniq gear from 25 years ago.

- regarding the suggestion of doing an ASR sysex remote thing first: i wouldnt recommend that. the ASR never responded to anything sysex all too well, and the reason the integration with wavelab&co in the past was super slow was not because of wavelab but because of the ASR. also, getting a modern PC to talk directly to an ASR over stoneage SCSI 1 sounds like a complicated mess in its own right, and one that potentially requires the user to own specialized hardware (its not like the ASR has a USB port or anything). plus, the ASR was always super touchy when not being the sole master in a SCSI chain and nothing made it crash more than what i used to call "SCSI confusion". i wouldnt open that can of worms, really.

- just so you know, there are people on the net who have access to the entire library of ensoniq algorithms, ranging from the early ESP generation in the EPS 16+ to the fully matured ESP 1 as found in the ASR and DP 4 to the entire palette of the later ESP 2, found in units such as the DP pro, ensoniq paris, ASR X, MR and fizmo. make sure to post your emulation kickstarter also in the still active ensoniq paris forum:

http://kerrygalloway.com/ParisForums/

mike audet and chuck duffy were two people i know of that got their hands on the ensoniq algorithms in one way or another. i have absolutely no idea about the legal technicalities and whether they would be interested in helping you or not (mike audet ports dp pro algorithms to the paris platform to this day and sells them, so he might have a conflict of interest, but hes also a super nice guy and a true ensoniq freak, so that could go either way)

getting an ESP emulation to run as VST effect plugin alone would be really awesome. to this day, some of these effects are top notch, ensoniq had quite a hand for wonderfully mix-able reverbs, the waveboy resonant filter is to this day one of the best sounding digital moog-clones ever made to my ears (UAD are selling one that sounds less convincing that costs quite a bit of cash for that one filter alone), and theres just lots and lots of good sounding things, from standards like the super rich chorusses to weird stuff like waveboys "voder", a great sounding formant filter. so, even just the FX would totally be worth it, and theres literally hundreds of very very good algorithms for it.

but throw in an ASR, oh my god...transwaves! yay! if you get that thing to run, i would give you the complete "art of transwaves" (an ensoniq cdrom i made back in the day) to be part of the default sound library.

i would also recommend that you just focus on emulating one of the samplers, and that should really be the ASR. theres nothing the EPSses can do that the ASR cant, but theres quite a lot of stuff the ASR can do that the EPSses cant. really, since the issues of back then (memory overflows and midi timing issues) wouldnt matter in a VST anymore, i think its safe to say that you would cover all the relevant stuff by simply doing the ASR 10 with its last OS update (3.53, if i remember correctly).

i assume you have my email from your kickstarter backers list. if theres anything i can help you with, please feel free to contact me.

Ensoniq ASR/EPS emulating VSTi launched on kickstarter