Coffeeshopped has announced that Patch Base, a synth patch editor that was previously only available for iOS, is now available for MacOS.
The app is designed to streamline making sounds for a variety of synths, from Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Casio, Oberheim, Ensoniq, and more. It also opens up real-time editing of each synth’s parameters, random patch generation, sound library organization, iCloud backup of your patches and more.
The app itself is available as a free download, allowing limited use of all synthesizers that the app supports. Full support for each editor is available via In-App Purchase.
Details on Patch Base, and the synths that it supports, are available at the Coffeeshopped site.
Went to their site and spent a half hour. Could not find out how much it costs. Free is not an answer. It’s not free. Could not find out what functions are unlocked with paying for an instrument. No pdf manual and manual has table of contents in non-scrolling popup menu larger than screen. No information about exporting patch lists to sequencers. Claims to be “made in Austin” but uses proxy identity hiding services to shield their identity.
I miss Galaxy and blame Henry J. for its loss.
Not a difficult concept. Just download it and and follow the directions. Works amazingly well and worth the investment to unlock older synths.
Well it takes 3 minutes to find out about the costs, just download the app and add a synth. You can edit a handfull of params to try it out and It’s 44 euros to unlock one synth which is quite steep..Or 88 per year for everything.
> just download the app and add a synth [to find out how much it costs]
I’m not going to install software just to find out how much it costs. That’s completely absurd. Also absurd is that no where on their site, not even in their faq, do they tell you the only way to find out the price is to install software from some company going to legal lengths to hide their actual identity. Installing software from unknown people is about as safe as drinking moonshine made by someone you don’t know. Perhaps the modern equivalent would be LSD tabs, is that what all the kids are doing these days?
It’s an interesting idea though. I wonder if the price changes depending on how much money they think you have, which they determine after poking around on your device to build a financial profile.
And that’s an over-50’s approach to informatics: “Hey, I don’t understand how something works, it must be a virus!”.
First, no, they have absolutely no way to determine how much you earn. They’d need to build a spyware good enough: possible? Yes. Likely? Not even remotely. It’d cost them way, way more than their patching app itself.
Second, I too would like to know the price beforehand, but it’s extremely common to “hide” it, especially on mobile devices: they’re called “in-app purchases”. It’s not a tragedy, in my opinion, you simply test the app before deciding whether it suits your need or not.
Third and last point, “is that what all the kids are doing these days?”. Well, I know a friend who’s afraid of using debt and credit cards… unless you’re downloading a strange app from an even funkier website, you’re not going to catch a virus so easily today. And it’d need to go undetected, if you use Windows, through both your anti-virus and Windows’ embedded one. Besides, it’s a well-known app for iOS… come on.
For your interest, I downloaded the app and my computer still works (a miracle?). It’s not bad, but it lacks a lot of recent synths and costs way too much. The reason they hide the cost is simply this: it’s a relatively expensive software, so in order to increase their chances, they try and “force” you to test it (hoping you’ll like it enough) before knowing the final price.
I have it for iPad. I didn’t get the ‘all you can synth’ purchase. It works great.
Correction: I DID get the ‘all you can synth’ purchase which at some point or another I used it for Blofeld, reface DX, Jd-Xi
I have the iPad app and use it for Matrix-1000 only. I agree the pricing is annoying depending on how many or few synths you have to use it with. It does work better than the free options I’ve tried, at lease for the M-1000. I hope there is a discount for iPad app owners because I would rather use the desktop version, but I will never buy a subscription for any software.
There used to be a bunch of this type of app. Not any more. This is easily the best of what is currently available and well worth subscribing to if you have the hardware.
Agreed. The binaries are still out there but good luck running an app made for OS 10.2 on a modern mac without a whole lot of duct tape. I wish Coffeeshopped all the success but wish this were an HTML5 app. There are plenty of methods available to run them offline and/or self-contained.
As the author of the now-unsupported PatchMorpher, I thought I’d chip in. Writing synth-editor apps like this is incredibly time consuming and expensive – so I’m not at all surprised at the price. Not only do you need to cover your development costs, you have to purchase (or possibly borrow) a whole bunch of current synths. Then keep abreast of updates on the synths’ firmware (and work-around the bugs!) as well as whatever OS you’re on & libraries you’re using. All in all, extremely difficult to make a profit, let alone a living.