Kawai K1 as VSTi - Nils' K1v is here

[.jon]

Nils,

you're an excellent communicator, easily among the very best I've seen on this board (and I've been here for a while). Happy to support your further developments!

As simple and old-fashioned as this Kawai emu is, I haven't enjoyed a plugin synth as much in a long, long time

[mrsugmad]

Hey Nils,
I have noticed that you have moved away from macOS development altogether and moved to niche market - ubuntu instead.
What a shame

Mac Statement

I rented a machine to compile the project, which worked, but I can't install software there that supports VST plugins so I am forced to have external testers, which gives pretty bad turnaround times. Testers reported that bitwig complains about "MissingMetadataException" when they tried to use this version, other DAWs just don't see the plugin at all so something is wrong with my package so it is not detected as a VST plugin.

I realized that a cloud machine is not the right development platform so I'm waiting until I can return to the office (which is not possible thx to Corona) and pick up a spare Mac Mini that I'm going to use.

It is interesting that Mac users always seem to expect that everyone else in the world owns a Mac, too and that development for a Mac should be straightforward and no big deal.

I use Windows since more than 20 years and never had a private Mac so far so I'm sorry that I'm not faster. During the past weeks I had to deal with lots of Mac things that i had never heared of: "Code signing", "App bundles", some weird Info.plist and Pkginfo files that need to have proper data, a keyboard mapping in Xcode that does strange things when I'm trying to code and other stuff.

The reason that there is a Linux version first is that I can install Linux in a VirtualBox for free and test it. I would love to see Mac finally supporting this officially, too, I'd even pay for a Mac OS X that supports VirtualBox, but Apple has decided that people have to own the real hardware.

The current status is that every code change is already compiled and packaged on a Mac as .dmg (big shout out to github CI) so once I have the Mac Mini that is waiting for me at my workplace, I can resume (and hopefully finish) development quickly.

Calling that a shame is not really appropriate in my opinion.

You have nothing to apologize for, Nils. It's the people who expect you to develop for their platform for free when you don't have that computer -- and they're not exactly lining up to loan you one, either -- who should apologize.

These are the people who should be ashamed of the demands they're placing upon you. If they'd paid for the synth and were waiting for an update, that's one thing. But that's not at all what's going on here.

Please just keep doing what you've been doing and know that what needs to get done will get done. Either someone will loan you a Mac...or the others will wait patiently and be thankful you're doing this at all.

You owe no one anything.

Steve

Priorities

""In the area of desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft Windows is generally above 70% in most markets and at 77% to 87.8% globally, Apple's macOS is at around 9.6% to 13%, Google's Chrome OS is up to 6% (in the US) and other Linux distributions are at around 2%. All these figures vary somewhat in different markets, and depending on how they are gathered""

[BBFG#]

... and again, Linux is an open system which can mostly be downloaded for free and ran on almost any pc.
Apple pretty much requires an Apple.
Want it quicker for Mac?
Send the developer a Mac.

[moss]

Got the following error trying to export a single sound I created as sysex. Attached is the problematic sound as a Bitwig preset.

ErrorExport.png

[Atlatnesiti]

... and again, Linux is an open system which can mostly be downloaded for free and ran on almost any pc.
Apple pretty much requires an Apple.
Want it quicker for Mac?
Send the developer a Mac.

I have 2017 iMac that is just sitting in the box and don’t use it at all (using latest Mac Pro) and willing to donate to NILS
It is i7 and 32GB Ram
I’m in Australia though.
Will send it anywhere in the world providing I will not have to pay the shipping fee.

[Guenon]

Priorities

There's another viewpoint to statistics like this

If one wishes to publish a nice free tool (free as in beer/speech/both), and also realizes that free/open systems happen to have fewer tools available in that particular usage area, what ever it might be, leading to much less adoption of said systems in that category... then it actually encourages to publish your free tool on such a platform, instead of vice versa. If you are interested in supporting non-proprietary platforms, that is.

In today's operating system climate, from all sides, supporting open platforms is something I see as a great thing. So for example, Apple systems have a wide variety of very high quality instruments available natively, Linux-based systems have fewer. Publishing some single high quality instrument on the latter is a much bigger deal than publishing it in an ecosystem that already has loads.

(Edit: this might be something that sparks debate, and in a thread like this, I think it's best just to politely disagree and then move on, staying on topic. So, on my part, thank you Nils for supporting Linux , and for this lovely emulation; Kawai K series synths were the first hardware ones I ever owned, and so this hits close to home for me, hehe.)

[Nils Schneider]

Got the following error trying to export a single sound I created as sysex. Attached is the problematic sound as a Bitwig preset.
ErrorExport.png

Thanks for reporting this. Turned out that its not an issue of the data, but the storage location. Preset 32 of any bank cannot be exported. Will be fixed in the next version

[glokraw]

Keep in mind that serious hobbyist and pro musicians are a very small subset of that 70% range, as well as in the smaller Apple range, and nearly nonexistant in
the goodle 6 %

Serious linux musicians make up a larger percentile of the 'market' than meets the eye,
and many run multiple computer OS's, multiple computers, and multiple versions of linux, each tools suited to jobs at hand, as budgets allow. Linux daws include
Bitwig, Reaper, Mixbus/Ardour, Carla, and Qtractor. Wine and LinVst plugin wrapper
allow a huge number of quality plugins to join growing numbers of native-linux versions, of which this K1, and Surge, are extremely welcome. I just finished a new wine-enabled install of the latest Cakewalk By Bandlab, nearly flawless, considering it is such a beast and great wine progress is ongoing. Linux can be a nice alternative when a win10 ambush-update strikes, or when a new Mac cannot fit the budget. I read where someone set up a hack-in-tosh/linux dual-boot system
What those crazy mac/linux lovers won't do!
Cheers

[Atlatnesiti]

In such a context, that translates to "Schade", not "Schande", though. I´m sure all the Mac users in this thread (me included) appreciate your efforts.

Indeed, then I'm sorry if my statement feels too offensive. Nevertheless, having some explanation of what I'm doing/waiting for might help others to understand why it takes a bit longer

Many apologies if I offended you in any way - didn’t mean to Really appreciate your efforts and taking your time working on macOS and thank you very, very much for an update.
Kind regards

Hello Nils,
Just “bumping” up the thread since it’s gone down to page 4 now
Btw; Can you provide us - Mac users, with your progress on macOS K1v if any pretty please?
Kind regards

[Nils Schneider]

What a coincidence. Yesterday, I've got a Mac Mini 2012, finally I can test my work now

[Atlatnesiti]

What a coincidence. Yesterday, I've got a Mac Mini 2012, finally I can test my work now

Thank you muchly

[lotus2035]

Site down for anyone else?

https://k1v.nilsschneider.de/

edit: working for me now

[czsynth]

Hi Nils,
can you please add all 200 dumped presets from Kawai PHm to 768 presets from K1v. The final number of "factory presets" K1v would increase to 968. I think presets from Kawai PHm are better than presets from ROM cards.
Two additional empty banks of 32 init presets would also be very useful .
Thanks!

[Nils Schneider]

Hi there,

I've been able to load & use a Mac VST build of K1v in Ardour 6 Demo. Anyone else that could give it a shot?

https://nilsschneider.de/files/NilsK1v-MacOS.zip

Needs to be unpacked and copied to: /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST

Thanks!

Nils

[FrogsInPants]

I've been able to load & use a Mac VST build of K1v in Ardour 6 Demo. Anyone else that could give it a shot?

It's not appearing for me in Reaper. (REAPER v6.13, 64bit, OSX 10.13.6) I also added another new VST in the same directory, which did appear after the re-scan.