preset format ownership

[Kriminal]

It also raises the point of all the recent analogue 'emulations' with presets that match the originals... are they already 'stealing' ?

well, most of those are paper manuals with settings printed, so i guess they are copywritten...? as for the presets, most dont matc' 1:1 in softsynths, and add to that they mostly sound crap....'cosmic cat' 'wind' and 'xylophone' are not really the sounds kids are looking for these days

[AdmiralQuality]

How much do you have to change a preset before it becomes your own? Could someone just tweak the volume knob and claim them as their own?

when testing a synth last year (maybe year before actually) testers were told that a preset (by company or testers) had to have at least 12 diff settings to params to be a 'new' preset (thats what i recall, numbers may be different, maybe more, but i think it was 12)

OK. But what if I change 12 parameters by 0.001% each?

You see my point... it's hazy.

[Kriminal]

How much do you have to change a preset before it becomes your own? Could someone just tweak the volume knob and claim them as their own?

when testing a synth last year (maybe year before actually) testers were told that a preset (by company or testers) had to have at least 12 diff settings to params to be a 'new' preset (thats what i recall, numbers may be different, maybe more, but i think it was 12)

OK. But what if I change 12 parameters by 0.001% each?

You see my point... it's hazy.

yes, i know what you mean, but for that test it worked as no one tried to pass anothers work of as their own....as far as i know

basically i could turn all osc down an octave and call a sound mine couldnt i ?

[AdmiralQuality]

basically i could turn all osc down an octave and call a sound mine couldnt i ?

Totally. There's 3 different places on Poly-Ana that control oscillator pitch. You could turn it up an octave on each of 3 OSC OCT settings. Then turn it down an octave on the 3 OSC COURSE TUNE settings (assuming you have enough range left) and have the EXACT same sound even though 6 parameters are significantly changed. And there's an overall octave switch in the performance section as well. If you have filter tracking enabled then you'll probably need to tweak the cutoffs as well, so that's 2 more parameters we've changed without making any change to the sound. We need 4 more... we could use parameters that aren't even used. Like modulation sources for destinations where the Amount is set to zero. Doesn't matter which source you pick if it's off, but it's still a significantly changed parameter.

Lots of other ways to do this too.

This is part of why we never want to get into the business of selling presets. By all means send me your favorite programs and if we like them we'll redistribute them free. But if you do, you don't "own" them any more. (Though we're happy to give you credit.) And neither do we. For what it's worth (not much) I hereby declare all Poly-Ana patches public domain! (Of course I can't stop someone from selling them on their own if they want.)

Free Poly-Ana patches: http://admiralquality.com/products/Poly-Ana/patches/

[aciddose]

nobody can own a format, but the content itself is under copyright.

so you can write translators and tools as you wish. it isn't up to you to police how people use your tool and if it has intention other than copyright violation it's protected. for example see just about all the format duplication and transfer tools that exist. the vcr was a huge legal hassle, but that was in the 1970s!

the reality of the situation will come out eventually. europe has sensible leadership. vst's structure itself can't be under copyright when it can be reverse engineered and duplicated independently and is required for compatibility. it contains no creative content. it requires no direct "copy" which is what copyright is all about.

likewise with data formats. the thing you have to worry about in the united states is patent law as some formats may be protected under patent. europe again is sensible and has banned such patents.

now we have to hope the united states rules similarly in the oracle vs. google case. the court has already referred to the european case and copyright is supposed to be established uniformly by all treaty signatories. it might seem likely to succeed but a lot is at stake. this is a huge landmark case and will change everything.

[Kriminal]

Isnt this similar to what sample convertors do, change a preset format do you can use it in another sampler...ie kontakt to wusik etc?

[Borogove]

Regarding how much you have to change a preset to make it "yours", I'll just leave this here.

Regarding translation of presets from one synth to another, if that's even in your mind as a possibility you need to start using more innovative synths.

[AdmiralQuality]

Isnt this similar to what sample convertors do, change a preset format do you can use it in another sampler...ie kontakt to wusik etc?

That would be like saying you can sell someone else's music online as long as you resample it to a different sample rate than the original CD.

Hell, you could change the volume by 0.01%.

If people are doing this and getting away with it, that's a damn shame.

Oh wait, I see what you're saying now, just a sampler format converter. I thought you were suggesting you could steal someone else's samples as long as you mash the data a bit.

I think you pay to use the samples. It shouldn't limit what software you use the samples IN. Most of the big samplers these days can load the other guys' formats anyway.

[aciddose]

yeah that part should be obvious, but something else is obvious too. the typical person's casual at best understanding of copyright is poor. they don't know what it applies to, when, where, why or what the exceptions are. the general understanding is "you can't copy something done by someone else." this is obviously not how copyright is defined.

there is no way in hell you could decode/copy/extract presets and ship them. that's derivative and 100% out.

import them yes. let your users import warez presets? yes. copy and distribute them? no.

[Kriminal]

Isnt this similar to what sample convertors do, change a preset format do you can use it in another sampler...ie kontakt to wusik etc?

That would be like saying you can sell someone else's music online as long as you resample it to a different sample rate than the original CD.

Hell, you could change the volume by 0.01%.

If people are doing this and getting away with it, that's a damn shame.

Oh wait, I see what you're saying now, just a sampler format converter. I thought you were suggesting you could steal someone else's samples as long as you mash the data a bit.

I think you pay to use the samples. It shouldn't limit what software you use the samples IN. Most of the big samplers these days can load the other guys' formats anyway.

yes, thats what i mean, nothing dodgy, just making the same sound available in a diff player

i guess if you really wanted a bank but didnt have that synth, it would be good to be able to load it into a synth you do have. Trouble, the synths would have to be practically identicsl to get the same sounds, so you may as well get the original synth

[AdmiralQuality]

i guess if you really wanted a bank but didnt have that synth, it would be good to be able to load it into a synth you do have. Trouble, the synths would have to be practically identicsl to get the same sounds, so you may as well get the original synth

Actually as long as the destination synth is a superset of the features of the source synth, it should be do-able. I've been chewing on this in the back of my mind since yesterday, and there are a lot of classic synths as well as soft-synths that I could easily map onto Poly-Ana.

I was thinking that it was kind of a shame that things like Poly-Ana's stereo voice path and dual filters would get wasted, but then I realized I could even make the converter use those when appropriate. (Say if the original patch had a chorus effect that was on. Poly-Ana has no stereo-chorus, but it could use that as a cue to add another oscillator with similar settings, slightly detuned and panned in stereo. This obviously wouldn't sound exactly the same, but the intent and general effect are the same.)

There are lots of peculiarities in every synth's design that affect the sound, so no, you'd never expect to get an exact same sound out from a different synth. But on the other hand I've been impersonating Oberheim, Roland and Moog sounds in my preset design since the very start. So you could expect it to get close.

The really hard part would be calibrating things like the filter cutoffs and the filter envelope amount. But this isn't really much different from the kind of analysis we do when we clone a classic synth.

I wonder if there's a really simple synth I could start with. Juno-106 might be a good candidate as it has such a minimal and restricted voice architecture. You could maybe even make a converter that read the original tape audio backups if you don't have SysEx patch dumps available.

[aciddose]

now you have the task of finding good banks for a 106. good luck.

[AdmiralQuality]

now you have the task of finding good banks for a 106. good luck.

I'm sure there's a ton of banks out there. As to whether they're good or not, the 106 only makes about 5 useful sounds. (Ok, ok, you can get more than 5 useful sounds, but you know what I mean.)


MKS-80 would be even better. I started out intending to make an MKS-80 clone, but figured why limit myself? I can't think of anything the MKS-80 offers that couldn't be duplicated in Poly.

I'm not that familiar with Synth1 but it certainly does seem to be popular. I wonder if all its features could be pounded into a Poly-Ana shaped hole?

[AdmiralQuality]

I just re-read the MKS-80 manual and that would be the one I'd want to take on. Poly-Ana can reproduce every one of its features without even breaking a sweat.

Now I need a real MKS-80 to calibrate against. Anybody in Toronto want to lend me one?

Actually, I might know someone...