@bibenu You're welcome :)

I've since bought a 2.1mm/5.5mm extension lead, on ebay, to extend the round plug end of the power lead. They're popular for CCTV installations, so they're not hard to find. I won't give a link because ebay listings are short lived, and it would probably only be of use to other people in the UK.

The one I bought was from a seller called switch_elec, and has a right angled plug, to go into the anyma phi. They also had straight ones, and different lengths. It was listed as
"1M Right Angle Male to Female 2.1mm x 5.5mm DC Extension Lead Connector".

@milododds I only do it as a hobby too. Thanks for your soundcloud link. That's an impressive collection of recordings. I've never recorded myself playing an instrument... maybe one day.

It will be interesting to see how the anyma phi evolves, and what else gets added to it. I like the idea of a brass simulation. The Korg Prophecy had one, apparently, but I don't know how useful it was. It seems to have been to hard to edit, for most people to do more than tweak the factory patches.

@support_aodyo Soft MIDI Thru would be useful.

Since it would be done in software, you could also consider having the option of simple polyphonic chaining - by not passing on notes that are played, and having the option (as a Note Priority setting) of not accepting a new note while one is held down but passing it on to the next synth in the chain, instead.

That would encourage people to own more than one anyma phi, to add more polyphonic voices.

@peter-ostry My personal preference is to use all CCs, because a CC is only 3 bytes long, and can be shorted to two if there's a stream of the same one, by using "running status", where the first (status) byte is only sent when it changes.

It's also the easiest thing to program a hardware MIDI controller to send directly, i.e. for one where you can set which CC each control takes. Plus it's easier to use CCs than either NRPN or sysex in Ctrlr.

One problem with CCs is that there are only so many of them (128) and some of them are best not used for this purpose, because they have very specific meanings. Realistically, there are only maybe 100 that are useable, in most cases.

The other problem is that they only send 7 bits of data (representing 0-127).

The next choice would be NRPNs. They're longer than a CC but normally shorter than a sysex message. They can send 14 bits of data (representing 0-16383) and it's not essential to send both bytes at once, which has a big advantage;

Most MIDI controllers encode their knobs to 7 bits. On some, it's possible to set a control to physically send either the top 7 bits (course value) or the lower 7 bits (fine).

Failing that, it can be done in something like Ctrlr - the physical MIDI controller can sent CCs representing course and fine values, which Ctrlr can then translate to course and fine NRPN values.

I guess anyma phi needs to use NRPNs rather than CCs for those two reasons - two many parameters to fit in the useable range of CCs, and needing more resolution than 7 bits.

It could be done in sysex, but there are very few physical MIDI controllers that can do that at all, let alone well. Having made a few "panels", and changes to panels, in Ctlr, I much prefer using CCs, but I can see that might not be an option.

@markusschloesser said in Maxforlive device?:

Mackie C4

Nice. Can Maxforlive host the VST version of Ctrlr?

I've made a generic panel with the same layout as the Akai MidiMix knobs... so far, I haven't bothered to add the buttons. The idea was to use it as a translation table, to use that controller with different synths, by making a variation of the panel for each one.

So far, it just sends CCs, which can be edited easily enough in "panel mode", to make CC controls for synths. I have some code I could add to send NRPNs, but that gets a bit more complicated.

As yet, I've only used that method to add more knobs to my MODOR NF1-m - the mini desktop version of that synth, not much bigger than the anyma phi. I could adapt it to the a.p. though, once I have a better idea of what parameters would be useful to control.

@milododds You might want to look into using Cockos Reaper (from reaper.fm), as your DAW. For one thing, they have a very active forum, with members helping each other, and there's lots of tutorials, on YouTube.

Also, it's very cheap to buy a license that gives you updates for the next few years, but you can just start using it for free, and put up with the nag screen for a while, when you start it up.

I don't have a lot of experience of it, but I have tried it, and it seems suitable. It can do the thing where you have tracks of MIDI data that you can see the details of on the screen, to send whole songs or just loops to a synth.

The DAW I actually use, a little, is Cantabile, with the Solo license (cheapest paid license), but that's not what I do with it, and I'm not sure it can do that at all. It's meant mostly for hosting VSTi and effects plugins, for playing live.

I mostly use it to host Ctrlr, which lets me make control panels for synths, or use ones made by other people, then I can assign physical knobs, from a MIDI controller. That's something you can still do in Reaper though, so you could add a control panel to tweak things with CCs, at some point in the future.

FWIW, Nick Batt, from sonicstate, who reviews a lot of synths on YouTube, uses Reaper.

Your M-Audio M-Track Duo interface seems ideal for taking sound from the synth, to feed back to the DAW. Probably the main uses of that would be to record it, in the DAW, and/or feed it through effects plugins.

@milododds Cool. The volume thing could just be that some of the patches take quite a bit of velocity, to get loud - I'm pounding on my little Yamaha keyboard more than I'm used to. They can be tweaked though.

Yes, plugging it in with USB shows the anyma phi as an output for notes and CCs, and also shows its MIDI In and Out, which you could use to connect other gear to the PC, I guess - I haven't tried that yet.

I don't use DAWs much, but you could use one as a sequencer to send notes to the anyma phi. If you have an audio interface, you can route sound from the ap to effects plug ins in the DAW.

@milododds That sounds promising. I'll resist the urge to make any more suggestions, and let Matthias get on with it :) I hope you manage to get it sorted out. I hate having to send things back too.

@milododds I'm sorry to hear that.

The point of trying to get the white LED on the synth to get brighter or dimmer as you drag a key in VMK with the mouse, was to check that the synth is actually receiving MIDI and responding to it. I haven't seen a MIDI indicator anywhere, but that would be it responding to MOD, as though you were turning the mod wheel.

One final thing you could try is patch 7, "piezo_pling", which doesn't rely on MIDI at all - just turn up the volume and tap on the case. If it's working, you'll hear a sort of clanging sound, provided the internal piezo is working too.