sy.factory is a cross platform Librarian for the Yamaha SY77/TG77 and SY99 family of synthesizers, that allows you to organise your SY data from the comfort of your computer.
If you plan to use sy.factory with an SY99, please read the note on SY99 Support and some current limitations and issues.
sy.factory has been written by me, Derek Cook, and is available exclusively as a free download from www.xfactory-librarians.co.uk. The free version is fully functional apart from the save and export features (including MIDI export) and Librarian support are disabled. This allows you to evaluate the features of sy.factory to see if you like it before buying it. If you wish to use sy.factory and enable the save and export functions you will need to register sy.factory and pay a shareware registration fee.
sy.factory was written as I have never been able to find a librarian for the SY77 that supports the synth in the way that I want.
I am greatly interested in user feedback for shaping future versions of sy.factory. Comments and bug reports on the current features of sy.factory and requests for future features can be sent to support@xfactory-librarians.co.uk.
sy.factory is programmed in Java, however, you as a user do not need to worry about that as the Java components required by sy.factory are embedded in the application.
The application has been developed and tested for Java 17 on Mac OS X, and it is also tested on Windows 10 and Linux Mint
It should be noted however, that there is a problem with MIDI on Windows 7 and above, which stops large SYSEX messages (greater than 256 bytes) from being received. This is a general Windows 7 problem as the problem can be seen in low level diagnostic tools, such as MIDIOX, so it is not a Java MIDI problem or an x.factory problem.
The impact this has on sy.factory is that it cannot receive SYSEX dumps of the SY sequencer, and the same problem will probably be seen on SY99 sample dumps when supported.
These problems are not seen on Windows XP (I'm not certain about Vista as I no longer have it) nor are they seen on OS X. When I get time, I will try and follow this issue up with Microsoft, assuming they allow you to submit bug reports in this area.
If you are running on Windows 7 and above, I would recommend that you exclude Sequencer data from the bulk transfer preferences in sy.factory
The screen shots you see in this manual have been taken with sy.factory running upon OS X. The look and feel of the application will vary depending upon your target JRE and computer platform, so don't worry if sy.factory looks slightly different upon your system.
This release of sy.factory fully supports the SY99 with the exception of translating between SY77 and SY99 Voices, which I will now be looking at in a future release. This support may be staged over several releases. The tricky part will be the effects mapping!
Please be aware of the SY99 Sample issues which are listed in the Sample Issues Page.
You now have to set the Audio Output destination for the playback of SY99 samples. You do this on the Miscellaneous Preferences Tab of the Preferences dialog.
Also please note there is a small issue on OS X in setting the playback volume of Waves and Samples. For some reason if you reduce the volume, you still seem to get the start of the wave/sample at full volume, which provides a "thump" at the start of playback. I have been unable to fix this, and need to examine it further, but right now I am baffled as to why this is happening!