x.factory - Java Librarians

What do these librarians provide?

I'll answer this question by going back in history a little! The x.factory series of librarians grew out of some of the frustrations I had with doing certain things on my Yamaha EX5 synthesiser, which I bought in late 1999. Whilst most editing on the EX5 was fairly easy from the front panel, certain things were either very hard or very tedious to do (or both!) on the synth itself. For example, changing voices that used custom waves to reference the custom waves in either DRAM memory of FLASH memory. This prompted me to write a tool to do this "remapping" automatically. Following this, my next frustration was that there was no simple way to change the organisation of voices and performances in memory (e.g. to match a gig's running order), and if you did move voices the hard way then any performances referencing these voices had to be manually edited to ensure they still referenced the correct voices. So I wanted a librarian that would allow me to move things around without references getting lost. I couldn't find such a thing for the EX5, so I decided to write my own, and ex.factory was born.

Typical features within the librarians include:

Each application can have several files open.
Each window can show either a tree view or a table view of the data, and each window can be either horizontally or vertically split.
You can move, insert or delete objects such as voices within files and any objects such as performances that reference the affected objects will have the references updated.
If you copy objects such as performances to new files then any referenced objects such as voices will be automatically copied as well if they don't already exist in the destination file.
You can sort objects by name, and by category (if supported).
You can search for objects by name.
In the tree view, you can copy components of an object to another, for example the reverb settings of a voice to another voice.
You can export the data to a variety of different formats, such as patch script files for popular sequencing packages, or even formats compatible with Wordprocessors and Spreadsheets to save you typing out patch listings by hand.
Full librarian support for storing all of your patches in one single database.
Full online help, and a PDF version of the online help.

Since writing ex.factory and as I have acquired other synths, I have tended to write similar librarians for my new synths so I have the same features available for all of them. This website has been created to group them all together and provide them with a home.

The other thing that was important to me was that I wanted these librarians to be cross platform as a number of my friends had Macintosh computers, and eventually I became a Mac user myself (the Librarians are now developed on a Mac first!). I wanted this cross platform portability to be transparent to me. I achieved this by writing the applications in Java, which certainly does live up to its promises of providing a cross platform environment.

What don't these librarians provide?

I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, so these librarians do not provide much in the way of sound editing features, as the synths I have are fairly well covered in this respect. What I have focused on is editing features that are either difficult to do in a synth or for which there is no facilities that I know of for doing the job on computer. For example, sample editing for EX5 S1M files. This may change in the future, as I run out of things to do, and I may start working on editor support as a number of editors are no longer supported or available.