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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:

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.


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