Something from the OSC

There were plenty of really great tunes on the KVR One-Synth-Challenge’s Kairatune round. The tracks are available on the OSC-36 page. A Child’s Hope by Irion Da Ronin was voted for the best track by a clear margin. I got the biggest kicks out of Kaira’s Nightmare by Doc Jon.

I asked the participants to contribute some of their instrument presets and received a good set of really great sounds from Doc Jon, InterSlot Call, Kraftraum, Mark Heath, Manvanmars, Photonic and Ruedi Rena. The sounds are available at the KVR banks and patches section in a single FXB bank.

KVR One-Synth-Challenge

Kairatune has been chosen for the KVR One-Synth-Challenge competition. The idea in the competition is to produce a music piece using only sounds from the given synth, i.e. leads, basses, percussion – all from Kairatune. I can’t wait to hear what the contesters come up with.

Those willing to participate, who are not yet familiar with Kairatune, may want to have a look at some technical info and download some preset banks.

Eyes on the next year

I’m happy to see that the first update has been well received. There doesn’t seem to be any major problems anymore and based on traffic, users are enjoying this version in great numbers. My humble thanks to all of you!

I’ve got a long list of features i would like to see in Kairatune. Some of my ideas are quite inspiring but they still need some developing. The task at the top of my todo-list is to reduce the CPU load. I’ll be working on this in the future and will release updates if and when i manage to squeeze better performance out of the synth without compromising the sound.

I wish you all good time with your music and a happy new year!

And more sounds

Alv Faria has designed a bank of 30 instrument presets. There are lots of very useful electro-percussive sounds and some interesting SFX sounds. The bank can be downloaded from http://thefxbproject.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/kairatune-vsti-alv-faria-preset-bank which is a site for free preset banks for virtual instruments.

PlugINdex site for audio plugins reviews and news, provides a bank of 20 instrument presets. The bank is available at PlugINdex under Downloads/Presets.

Version 1.1 known issues

Importing an FXB bank file via host fails. Some hosts e.g. VstHost and FLStudio don’t suffer from this, but importing an FXB bank file on Reaper is known to fail. This is a bug in the synth and not in Reaper. As a workaround you can import FXB files via the synth interface’s Bank/Load button.

Added Jan 10, 2012

  • The negative vibra values change when knob is clicked.
  • The delay effect can’t be set to a very short delay time. Also the displayed and the effective delay time differ on smallest values.

Added Jan 14, 2012

  • The plugin doesn’t work in 64-bit Cubase.

Even more sounds

The user ENV1 was the first to release new instrument presets after Kairatune was released. Among those was the amazingly massive CS-80 / OB-X emulation preset. Now ENV1 has contributed a bank containing a total of 50 instrument presets. Some of the sounds on this bank are just huge. There’s many dramatic sounding rhythmic synths, some more classic synths, some really tight sfx sounds and even some percussion instruments. The bank is available in the KVR banks and patches section as usual.

Thank you very much for your contribution!

Polishing the update

It’s only a matter of days until i can put the first update out. This release is aimed to improve usability and fix any bugs found so far.

The limited MIDI support was to my mind the most important issue with the initial release. So that’s taken most of my attention in this release. All controls on the GUI can now be tweaked via MIDI.

The supported controls include pitch bend, aftertouch and all MIDI continuous controllers, for example modulation wheel. The synth now responds to MIDI program change messages which enables switching the instrument sounds by remote MIDI controller or sequencer.

I can imagine that the fixed velocity response may have been quite annoying to some keyboardists. So velocity sensitivity is now adjustable.

On most synths the master level control is memorized separately for each instrument preset. On some synths switching instrument presets doesn’t affect the master level. I personally appreciate the latter and changed the behavior in this release. The per instrument preset level can still be set via the master trim control.

The fancy mouse behavior caused serious problems to Wacom pen tablet users. This behavior can be disabled from the settings and preferences menu.

This should help the users who are having problems with unusual pointing devices.

The sound engine has remained untouched by most parts but i did improve the bypass controls eliminating the pops and clicks that occured when any of the fx or the drive were toggled on or off.

Unfortunately mousewheel support will remain on the wishlist. I need to ask around and do a bit research on that before supporting mousewheel.

Even though i never succeeded in reproducing a suspected crash reported by an Ableton Live user, i did find a bug in the MIDI event scheduler that may have caused the synth to crash on some hardware. I really hope that the problem goes away now and we’ll have another happy user.

Everything seems to be in fairly good order with the upcoming release. Just some factory preset checking and perhaps even some tweaking left to do before i’ll put the update out.