Moog Music Forum

I'm thinking of buying the Sound Tower editor-librarian, but I'm also wondering if there are alternatives for what I want to do. Mostly I just want to take my favourite presets from the old and new factory banks, combine them in one bank, and schlep that over to the LP. Once this is done I probably won't use the software much, because I like to edit from the front panel and I'm not likely to accumulate lots and lots of presets.

So, are there other software alternatives that would help me streamline this? Or is the Sound Tower program the only way to go?

As someone who has bought and paid for the Editor Librarian, I am also interested in an alternative. I have been wholly unimpressed with the quality of SoundTower's software (v1.30 has been very buggy), their lack of updates (we were promised an update months ago, nevermind an update for v2.0 of the LP OS) and their unresponsiveness to customer feedback (I have sent them several emails about bugs in the Editor/Librarian which have not been acknowledged, let alone addressed). SoundTower's customer service is also slow to respond to email (I had to email them to ask for my registration code after paying for it).

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend their software to other LP users, which sucks because it has potential to be such a great tool.

Please, if other users have had better experiences, let me know. I hope I'm the only one who experienced problems.

Why would you buy such an application anyway, the LP is tweakable enough in my opinion.. The morph funtion is probably the only reason why I would use the editor.
Maybe this could be implemented in the OS itself?

I have bought the software and don't regret it, because it at least offers some basic libraran and editing features which could (if the software would work bugfree) be done much faster there than directly at the LP.

I had the same issues as the others though.
Response to emails is a bit uneven, but what is worse is that the answers I get prove to be totally unreliable.

On April 27th, after reporting back how buggy the present version (1.3) is working, I received a message stating that "there is a new official update coming up this week".
It didn't.

After asking again, the email answer stated on May 15th "It should be done later today".
It didn't.

Next answer came on May 21st: "The update for LP was to be released last week but we fell behind for some reason."

Now I am getting increasingly annoyed: the actual Version 1.3 from their website (which had a broken LP link for a *much* too long time) is buggy, and even opens an active debug window all the time. It can't really be used in a proper way.

But they don't even feel the need to offer a reliable date for the update.
That's a lousy state of affairs, and a third class kind of customer support.

dada wrote:

Maskin wrote:Why would you buy such an application anyway, the LP is tweakable enough in my opinion.. The morph funtion is probably the only reason why I would use the editor.
Maybe this could be implemented in the OS itself?

for the reason given by the op, managing presets

I guess I'm not into presets that much..

maskin, it is also ten times faster to manage your own sounds with a librarian as it is with (tweaked) presets. And even sound shaping is done much faster in the software than with all the button presses, in part walking through submenues, on the LP.

As long as you are ready to spend the time for that it's no problem though...

jimknopf wrote:maskin, it is also ten times faster to manage your own sounds with a librarian as it is with (tweaked) presets. And even sound shaping is done much faster in the software than with all the button presses, in part walking through submenues, on the LP.

As long as you are ready to spend the time for that it's no problem though...

I didn't spend €1300,- (twice) to edit it with a mouse.

I think dada is right, there is just not enough demand for an editor so Soundtower doesn't want to spend too much time on updates.

OK, thanks for the warnings about Sound Tower. FWIW, I don't think their issues are limited to the LP editor, because I had a similar impression of a demo I downloaded for my Korg TR67. And there's probably a lot of demand for that one...

But back to Question A. If I want something to help with the one-time job of combining my favourite presets from both banks, ordering them in a logical way, and sending the whole thing over to the LP, is there any other software that I should be considering?

Also, I assume this would be possible by just saving each preset as a separate sysex file, and then manually sending them one by one? I assume I could use something like Midiox for that, although it would take some time.

midi ox will do what you want to do,for free,see this thread on how to use it.

see post by dave500

http://moogmusic.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=15

Thanks tangent, that's extremely helpful.

I just have one more question: is there a way using Midi ox (or anything else) to pick apart the whole-bank sysex into individual-patch sysexs? In other words, is there a utility that will take the single sysex file and break it down into 100 sysex files, each with one patch and each named after the patch? Probably too much to ask, I know! But it seems like the only other way to extract a single patch is to load a whole bank to the LP and then selectively send single patches back to the computer.

i haven't done it myself but i think midi ox can single out a bank in to single files(presets).not sure if you'd get the preset name from sysx.

i may be well and truly wrong though.

may be worth pm'ing dave 500,he seems to know what he is doing with midi ox.

Hate to jump on the negativity bandwagon but I haven't been overly impressed by the software either. Fortunately I got it free with the promo they were doing a few months back. The only replies to communications I got were in this forum even though I emailed them at 3-4 different email addys. It is nice to have software to manage your patches (not necessary for editing) but I'd hold out on paying for it until they get their bleep together.

There were a huge amount of complains on SoundTower's editor for the DSI Evolver as well, so I'm not surprised.
But I think that they got the software pretty ok in the end, so there is still hope if you have paid for it...

Luckily, I'm not a software guy myself.