Restarting the Fizmo Project

[worstofthewurst]

This is great! I was afraid that after the Solaris showed up, the Fizmo project would get put on hold. I'm totally incapable of contributing anything, except I am excited for every single update.

[Zenn]

Just another post in support of this heroic quest.

[impaler42]

^ +1 support

[Cybercardinal]

What the f*** ? I thought it was because of good news, when I saw the tread was bumped

But welcome Z

[Ashe37]

*shoots the zombie thread in the head*

[foodeater]

it wasn't so much there were extra parameters behind the scenes, the front panel was enough. what burned was that there was no way to zero out all of the controls from the front panel, and no actual initialisation parameter or patch.

Yeah, that was one of the first things I discovered that's a PITA... all of the factory patches come with hidden-parameter settings. If you build a patch from scratch from the panel, it will sound different depending on what patch was in that memory location previously, because you can't get rid of some of the hidden parameters.

This actually sounds very appealing, like a proto synplant. I like when software editors have mutation/genetic functions and I wish more synths would incorporate those principals into thier design.

But what's up with the name FIZMO? Does it stand for something? Between the name and the color (personally, i like it, but how many purple cars do you see?) they really must not have wanted to sell many. F īźmø or something probably woulda sold better.

[chrisfoster]

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to let you guys know about http://www.copperlan.org/

I think this tech will reach the point of being able to fully enumerate any connected device i.e discover all the parameters in say a Fizmo .

As it stands now it's a fantastic way of routing all your midi hardware and software (via CopperPlug) together and comes at no cost.

If I was a programmer and considering writing a patch editor, sysex editor/librarian etc I would use their Paid or Free C++ SDK

There is a third party who is making RG45 adapters that can retrofit any Midi device for native CopperLan compatibility.

The other great thing is that all Midi communications done over the network (i.e in the box also) are done at full 16Bit resolution...plug-ins also.

Highly recommended

Cheers,

Chris

[AdjustableSquelch]

Hi guys, I recently got a Fizmo and now know the whole pain about editing.

Didn't anybody look at the output from sounddiver when changing values all these years? I mean it's got a midi monitor window built in!

I've done some investigation and the command structure IS pretty much the same as the MR-10. I've been documenting what I find up at this github page

As you can see there are 3 variation of parameter setting commands (patch common, sound common, oscillator) and I'm working through Sound Diver and documenting the parameters here. Its a live doc and I'll be changing it over the next few days as I play about.

The bad news is that I don't know any hardware (or even software) generic controller that is going to work with this parameter sysex format, as even 7 bit values get mangled across a byte boundary. Time to ask your favorite vendor to support it!

However, I believe that we can change a lot of these values by NNRPN as well, as the NNRPNs issued from changes on the synth on the few I checked seemed to be offset from the sysex parameter number by a fixed value each time (I've not finished checking yet). And if the worst came to the worst, it would be trivial to write a bit of code for an arduino with a midi shield to translate from home made user defined NNRPNs to sysex output and just bung it in the middle of MIDI in. (in the case of waveform selection this is the only answer unless the editor can support a list of 4 byte values)

To aid in looking at this I've also written a MIDI monitor that runs in the browser. If it spots a Fizmo parameter change message, it decodes the values. It only works on Chrome (and i've only tried it in windows) and there's a slight bit of faff to set up (more faff if you are on PC and want it to work along side sounddiver). Anyway if you want to give it a spin, go here and read the documentation before trying it out.

[dnigrin]

@AdjustableSquelch, did you ever make further progress? For all of you who ever started on this Fizmo effort: keep it up, it will be greatly appreciated if you succeed!!

[FX23]

fizmo awaiting further instructions….

[Bonlucas]

Any further progress on this project?

[stikygum]

I'd pay some decent money for a Fizmo editor!

[cornutt]

Any further progress on this project?

Unfortunately the old laptop that I was running the dodgy Ensoniq version of Sounddiver on died, and I have never been able to get it to run on anything else. I'm hoping that someday I can track down the source code for it; if I could examine that, it would answer a lot of questions. Did I mention what a horrendous spew the patch dump format is? Until then, I don't think there is much else I can do. I've actually been thinking about selling the Fizmo, because I'm not using it much (the Solaris does wave morphing synthesis just as well, and it's a lot easier to figure out), and I could use the money for something else.

[dv4dbu]

Unfortunately the old laptop that I was running the dodgy Ensoniq version of Sounddiver on died, and I have never been able to get it to run on anything else.

For what it's worth, I've had success running SoundDiver on a Windows XP virtual machine inside VirtualBox. I attach an old MIDI interface to the virtual machine through the virtual USB driver. My 7 year old computer does just fine running both the primary sequencing environment in Windows 7 64bit and the virtual machine running SoundDiver. I'm happy to answer more specific questions if it would help. Hope you can find a similar solution!