All I wanted was a Dual Stereo Modulation Effects Pedal...

Fate can be very cruel. There's always been an interesting 'rule' in the audio synthesizer world which can be expressed quite simply:

Never give them exactly what they actually want!

And you can see this if you ever get Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) and try to find a synth with a specific set of characteristics. You will almost always find several close contenders, but one vital and  different feature will always be missing from each of them, and none of them will ever have all of the vital features. As Mandalorians say:

This is The Way...

In fact, it applies to more than just synthesizers. When you start to get to that fabled 10,000 hours of experience in something, then you start to notice that just about everything comes in small groups where it is impossible to ever get the 'perfect' set of vital features - one of them will always be left off, and all of the examples will be slightly flawed in one way or another. So you can never get exactly what you want - in terms of features or functionality. In some cases, it is possible to buy two items and get all of the features, but working with them is then much more difficult. In bad cases, you need to buy three or more to get all of the features you require, and working with them can be almost impossible... 

(Maybe I am swimming against the tide/current here. Perhaps this is just the intrinsic way that the world works. But...surely not?)

So, here's an example... All I wanted was a:

Dual Stereo Modulation Effects Pedal.

Source Audio started me on this quest <Sound of dramatic orchestral music indicating confidence and optimism...>. Their Ventris Dual Stereo Reverb is a superb example of something that ticks absolutely every single one of the vital features that I needed in a reverb:

- Stereo Input and Output

- 2 Separate DSPs for 2 separate effects at once

- Flexible Routing of the Audio (DSPs in series, or parallel)

- An External Software Editor (on a computer) for presets (Oh, and Presets as well!)

...and loads more 'nice but not vital' features! (MIDI, Expression Pedal input...)

https://www.sourceaudio.net/ventris-dual-reverb.html

Anyways, Source Audio got a loyal and very happy fan when I bought a Ventris. It is one of my favourite effects pedals. The Empress EchoSystem and Reverb are very close seconds with almost every feature covered, but they do not have external software editors (and even the amazing Zoia has a third party librarian that seems to be gradually evolving some editor-like functionality, so there is hope...). And... the truly gorgeous Poly Effects Beebo has an on-board touch screen, but no external software editor...

So, note that here we have an example of a product that has ALL of the vital features! This exception kind of proves that it is possible to have near-perfection - always having one vital feature missing is not a rule! 

But the Source Audio Ventris does have one drawback - it isn't a modulation pedal! Now, I know it isn't meant to be a modulation pedal, so I went to their web-site ( https://www.sourceaudio.net ) and looked for the equivalent dual stereo modulation effects pedal, which wasn't there, of course... There were some very, very nice effects pedals, but no dual stereo modulation effects pedal... Waaah! 

Hang on, this means that Source Audio know how to specify, design and engineer something that has total coverage of all of the vital features, but then they don't apply it to modulation? (Or Echo in their 'Nemesis' product, which is another story: a non-dual echo pedal...)

Maybe I was being too broad in my definition of modulation, so I removed some of the more esoteric varieties (ring modulation, auto-filter, harmonic tremolo, Leslie Speaker emulations, and even effects that arguably are not modulation effects at all, but which seem to turn up in some 'modulation' pedals: bit crusher, sample rate, overdrive...), and I ended up with an alarmingly basic 'modulation effects' list:

- Tremolo (and stereo pan)

- Vibrato

- Phaser

- Flanger

- Chorus

And even with this deliberately simpler list of features, Source Audio didn't have anything in this space - other than buying multiple mono pedals! So, I started to look for a similar dual stereo modulation effects pedal from elsewhere (sorry, Source Audio!) As you may know, there aren't very many effects pedals out there, and so this only took a few moments...

...

...

...

OK, so I lied. The reality is that there are a lot of manufacturers of effects pedals, and there are enormous numbers of pedals out there. In fact, 'enormous' isn't a big enough word! Zillions, perhaps! Of every shape, type, colour and with every feature set you could possibly think of... except, wherever I searched, for those four vital features that I specified above (Stereo, Dual DSP, Series/Parallel Audio Routing, and a Software editor). Oh, and not always providing the 5 basic modulation effects above... 

Pedals that came close!

Loads of effects pedals nearly met my requirements, but they all failed for one feature or another. The GFI System Synesthesia dual modulation effects pedal is so very, very close, ticking all of the boxes except... it has a monophonic input! (Being generous, a couple of my synthesizers do have monophonic outputs, but the vast majority have stereo outputs!) The Strymon Mobius modulation effects pedal only has one effect at once. And so it went on... Lots of mono pedals offering modulation effects, rather less stereo ones (and quite a lot of mono input, stereo output ones, like the otherwise wonderful GFI Synesthesia! (Which is arguably the GFI Wavelogic Mk III, but that really is another story, for another time...)). 

Perhaps going for high-end, professional 'big-box' effects pedal was my mistake, so I descended into the darker recesses of Amazon and looked at budget pedals. And here I found another almost-close contender - the Joyo Vision Dual Stereo Modulation Effects Pedal, which didn't have presets, didn't have a software editor (actually, no USB or MIDI, or...) and I'm not sure what the audio specifications are like... But, hey, it was a total bargain in terms of price! And it did more than the 5 basic modulation effects, and was stereo in and out! (So I have one on order!)

The Joyo Vision Dual Stereo Modulation Effects Pedal. Photo by Rombo on Unsplash

I even looked at buying two mono modulation pedals and seeing if that would work, but switching between the series and parallel audio routings would be a separate hardware project all of its own. For example, Empress make separate mono phaser, tremolo and chorus/vibrato/flanger pedals, which would mean acquiring six pedals and would require a patch-bay to give flexible routing, but it would look astonishing and would cost a small fortune! Maybe there's a YouTube video opportunity here... Oh, but I'm forgetting: no presets! Waaaah!

And that's where I am at the moment. Despite a lot of searching, I'm very confident that I have accidentally overlooked the one pedal (or maybe several pedals!) that does precisely what I want, and I'm sure that someone will take great delight in informing me about it (keep reading!). But why does finding it have to be so difficult? Why is a perfectly reasonable set of vital features not so obvious to pedal designers that I should be spoiled for choice, overwhelmed, etc.? 

A Competition With No Prize (other than being featured here)!

Which set me thinking... If any pedal manufacturer happens to be reading this, then feel free to let me know about your pedal that meets (or exceeds!) the 4 (four) vital features, and the 5 basic modulation effects, and if I like the look of it (I'm really looking for a professional spec device, of course), I will buy it and review it right here in this blog (I might even do a YouTube video!)! Your company could be my next 'Source Audio' (I must stop mentioning their name!)... Go on - show fate that you are superior! Show me and my readers that you CAN provide what we actually want!

MOD Devices Dwarf and DuoX

I have already mentioned the Empress Zoia, and Poly Effects Beebo, so I should also mention the two current multi-effects (and more) devices from MOD Devices. This time, there are ticks for all the features, including an external software editor, and the only barrier is the price, which is, as some people might say, 'reassuring exclusive'. I have a feeling, at the back of my mind, that I will eventually end up buying a MOD Dwarf or MOD DuoX, but there's also a little voice saying: 'You could buy a synthesizer with that money!' and so I get pulled in two directions and end up doing neither... 

What IS a 'Modulation' Effect?

Here's my 'basic' list again:

- Tremolo (and stereo pan)

- Vibrato

- Phaser

- Flanger

- Chorus

Looking at these in terms of what they do, then there are volume changes (tremolo, stereo pan), pitch changes (vibrato, chorus), and spectral changes or dynamic filtering (phaser, flanger). The common bit to all of them is that they are not static - whatever is being 'modulated', that change is either cyclic (via an LFO), or an envelope (either the actual volume envelope of an audio signal, or a multi-segment arbitrary waveshape). This means that we now have the beginnings of a taxonomy of modulation effects (which sounds much more complex than it actually is: a classification system), and which can be used to see if there are any gaps that are not currently exploited:

Basic 'Modulation' Effects

I have deliberately used 'Auto-Wah' to mean the repeated cyclic variation of a filter here, and used a more unusual and descriptive term: 'Envelope-Wah' for when it is the envelope that changes the filter frequency - this is sometimes called 'Touch-Wah' and a few other terms... Note that envelope-controlled pitch control doesn't have anything in the box - I couldn't think of (or find after a search) any effects pedal that does this, but, as I have noted in this blog post, this doesn't mean that such effects don't exist! it merely means that I haven't found them yet...

Two other 'envelope-controlled' effects are missing as well: Envelope-Phase and Envelope-Flange. once again, I don't recall ever hearing (or seeing) and effects pedal that did this...

The simplest envelope is a ramp, where the value just rises or falls, and this is sometimes called 'Ramping', so I have not added an extra column - but there are effects pedals where the Ramping can affect parameters like the LFO speed, and so you might like to imagine an even more detailed table...

Having called these the 'basic' modulation effects, there are lots of ways to extend and enhance the table. Tremolo and Stereo Pan are a good example - whilst they are both cyclic changes to the volume, the use of two channels in the Stereo Pan makes it a very different effect. So we shoiuld add a new row for 'Pan'. Harmonic Tremolo splits the incoming audio into two frequency bands and applies different tremolo rates and depths to them, and so we need to accomodate that as well, which means adding a 'Frequency Bands' row to the table. 

'Cyclic' is a bit vague, so let's split that column into two: one for LFO-waveform-based continually cycling effects, and a second column for step-sequencer based effects where the waveform is user-controllable and arguably more 'arbitrary' waves are possible. I've looked at the outer edges of this type of effect in a previous blog post...

All of these revisions give a much more comprehensive table:

A more detailed 'Modulation Effects' table...

This table reveals some additional empty boxes (I have filled in the Auto-Bend box because someone MUST make a pedal that does that!). I suspect that Source Audio's innovative  'Ultra Wave' pedals fill most of these gaps! (Source Audio again! My fandom goes into overdrive!)

Step-sequencing a harmonic tremolo (or pan position) sounds like it could be an interesting area to explore...

Feedback - the Zoom MS-70CDR

Felix Petrescu aka waka_x reminded me via Twitter about the classic Zoom MS-70CDR effects pedal, which is very interesting... (I have a Zoom L-12 mixer, for instance!) Firstly, because, as you might have inferred,  I tend to go for the high-end, professional-sized 'big box' pedals with lots of rotary controls, but for modulation, then I might be persuaded to try something more compact - as far as I can see, there is no MIDI and no external software editor, though (just librarians)... Secondly, since I was intrigued enough, I tried to buy one, and discovered that they aren't currently available on Amazon in the UK, and Andertons, my standard music retailer, weren't expecting them to be in stock until the end of April, so I'm now waiting... For something which has been around for nearly ten years, then I'm now wondering if a new version is imminent, perhaps? Or maybe in these times of chip shortages, there's a much simpler explanation. Anyway, I will soon find out... So huge thanks to Felix, and I'm looking into it. (There are lots of Zoom MS-70CDR resources on the InterWeb... I was very impressed with this one from Tonelib.net. )

Previously, I have also looked at another budget mono in, stereo out effects device: The Valeton GP-100.

Feedback - your idea here

As I said earlier in this blog post, there are SO MANY effects pedals out there, that it is almost impossible to keep yourself informed on all of them, all the time. Which makes me suspect that there's still a hidden gem lurking out there. An example of a near-miss would be the Wampler Terraform, which is stereo in, stereo out, has MIDI, presets, lots of rotary controls, and is only missing the dual DSP 'engine' approach, because it only does one modulation effect at once. But it's a very nice offering from a well-known pedal manufacturer... Close! 

Perfection?

I tried to specify the 'perfect' guitar pedal in a previous blog post...

Final thoughts...

Maybe 'Dual' modulation is the 'Next Big Thing', and I am asking about it just a little bit too early?

Alternatively, maybe I should stop dithering and go to the MOD Devices web-site?

It definitely looks like 'Source Audio' are an innovative effects company to follow more closely!

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Preparing a Decent Sampler Instrument (or Sample Pack) for uploading to Pianobook.co.uk - Part 2

Part 1 talked about gathering together all the files that you would need in order to submit an Instrument / Sample Pack using Decent Sampler so that it could be submitted to pianobook.co.uk . You could think of it as most of the 'Theory' side of the process.

This post, Part 2, is all about how you actually go about doing the registering with the pianobook.co.uk web-site, and then how you actually submit the files and fill in the text fields so that your Instrument / Sample pack actually gets uploaded correctly and with minimum hassle. So this is the 'Practical' side of the process.

The most important thing... is what you forgot to mention last time...

In Part 1, I forgot something very important, although I did mention it in passing. So, since this is all about the 'practical' bit, it is a good time to reiterate it. When you are developing anything based on samples, one of the most important things that you must do, before sending off any files, is to:

check your tuning and transposition... 

It is all too easy to work in a closed development loop, jumping back and forth between Decent Sampler and your favourite editor, (well, my current one anyway), and, unless you have perfect pitch (which fades with age, allegedly), or employ other tuning checks, then you can end up with a 'C' on the keyboard that plays an 'A' pitch, and you get an email from Pianobook Submissions that politely ruins your day...  

But I learn quickly (and forget faster), and so I bought two things:

- a Guitar Pedal that does tuning, which, it turns out, shows the Note, but not the Octave (Wah!)

  (There are lots of 'Tuner' pedals available at your favourite local or online music retailer, or Amazon. They come in many different sizes, and there are quite a few approaches to how the tuning is shown. The one I got shows A-G, plus sharps and flats, as well as how close your input actually is to that note, but not the octave.)

- a Tuner/Metronome, probably originally intended for more classical musicians that most readers of this blog, but which it turns out, is also mildly technologically-friendly: it has a jack socket and can be battery-powered! 

 (I bought a Korg TM-60, which has a quarter-inch jack input that accepts line level audio, and so can be used to check the output of Decent Sampler via a DAW via an audio interface (mine is a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 2nd Gen). Once again, I got one that doesn't show the octave, just the note... But for ease of use, then the TM-60 is definitely a winner.)

Alternatively, you could use your DAW, which almost certainly has a 'Tuner' plug-in...and it may even show the octave! And if there isn't one bundled in, then there are lots of Tuner plug-ins available from many online retailers. You may even find a free one. 

Despite all of this process, my brain still seems to find the connection between the Root Note of a sample and actual pitch a difficult topic. As I write, this, I have received another 'day ruining' email from submissions @ Pianobook.co.uk, telling me that their checks have found a tuning error in yet another virtual instrument. So, I make mistakes as well, and I can't even follow my own suggestions! Hopefully you will be better!

Registering

Part 1 was all about preparing the necessary files, so that the actual registration process would be as smooth as possible. So now, let's register... 

If you visit the Pianobook.co.uk web-site and are not a member, then the far right top menu bar will say 'Login / Signup. If you click on that button to Sign Up, then you get taken to the Login page, which is slightly confusing - but underneath the two big 'Login' text boxes it says:

Not signed up yet?

and there is a 'Join Now' button underneath. (There is also a 'Lost your password?' link!)

The Login dialogue box - you need the 'Join Now' button near the bottom...

Clicking on this button takes you to: https://www.pianobook.co.uk/members/register/ , which is a big dialogue box.

The 'Join Now' dialogue box...

Note that this page is also where you can go to if you need to reset your password... 

What you need to do first is fill in the six text boxes, which is where Part 1 comes in. I'm assuming that the 'Name' and 'Email' fields will be easy to fill in. but the next two fields have some instructions in grey text inside them, as reminders for what you should think about when choosing what to put in them.

Username is going to be used whenever you login to Pianobook.co.uk. In Part 1, I said that you should avoid using your real name or the Display Name which you will be using as your identification inside Pianobook.co.uk.  You can't have spaces either, so there's a temptation to use the first part of your email address (before the '@' symbol), which isn't a good idea because people may already know it. So 'johnsmith27' isn't so good, but 'SampleExpert1000' is quite good, and 'SampleXpert1k' is easier to type and harder to predict. There is also a note that reminds you that you cannot change your username currently, so one you have set your Username, it will stay like that. This is perhaps another reason to choose carefully. Perhaps I should have used a Username like: 'RememberTuning' so that I would check my sample tuning more carefully!

The Display Name can have spaces, and will appear on every post and reply that you make in the Pianobook.co.uk Forum, as well as being the name that will be shown alongside all of the Instruments / Sample packs that you upload. Forum posts will have your Gravatar picture visible, with your Display Name underneath, whilst for your Sample Packs, your profile photo will have your Display Name underneath it. So visitors to the Pianobook.co.uk web-site are going to associate your photo and your name with your samples or your Forum posts and replies. You should not use your Username, and if you have an online identity that is associated with your music, then you should use that. So, if you want to find me on Pianobook.co.uk, you would search for 'synthesizerwriter', and you will find me! 

A quick aside on Gravatar.com

When I mentioned Gravatar in the context of Forum posts, then you either knew what I was talking about, or else you wondered what a Gravatar 'picture' was? If you don't know about Gravatars, then your Forum posts and replies will use a simple white and grey picture, which is very boring. 

This is the default picture that everyone would see if I didn't have a Gravatar picture...

And these are the two Gravatar pictures that appear in the Forum. The synthesizerwriter one is from when the makers of 'The Simpsons' had a web-site that would turn a photo of you, into a 'Simpsonised' version. Unfortunately, the web-site is long gone. The Martin Russ picture (the name has been changed from the 'Not Dave' variant) is just me in my studio.

To get a Gravatar picture, you go to Gravatar.com and create a WordPress account (the process is not that different to what we have been doing here!) and you can then register email addresses and upload photos or pictures that will be associated with those email addresses. Any web-site that uses Gravatars will then use the picture that you have associated with an email address whenever that email address is used to identify you. In the case of Pianobook.co.uk, you have already entered your email address, and this will have been checked against Gravatar.com - if you have an account on Gravatar, and a picture associated with that email address, then that is what will appear in the Forum. 

(Yes, this is yet another hoop to jump through, but once you have done it, you will find that all sorts of web-sites will start to show your picture when you have told them your email address when you registered with them - many web-sites based on WordPress, for instance... )

Stop Press: As I was writing this, Pianobook.co.uk started making the transition to using Discord as a replacement for the Forum, so this information is now out of date... However, a lot of OTHER sites  use Gravatars!

Back to Pianobook.co.uk Registration...

Anyway, back to the Pianobook.co.uk registration:

The most important thing to remember here is:

Username and Display Name should be different!

Hopefully, you have got used to using a Password Manager by now, and so you will be ready with a brand new, different password, generated just for Pianobook.co.uk use. You should never, ever, use the same password for different web-sites, applications, or services. 

You need to enter the password twice. This is a subtle way to try and get you to use a password manager, because you may well make mistakes if you try to manually type the same mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols twice, exactly. Once you have made a mistake, then you will need to manually type the password twice again, which will quickly become tedious. In contrast, with a password manager, you take your new 'Pianobook.co.uk-only password, copy it, and then paste it into the two fields. Job done!

As is often the case with registering for a web-site or service, there are some terms and conditions to read. You need to read them via the link (open in a new tab) and then tick the box.

To try and prevent malicious people from flooding Pianobook.co.uk with lots of fake accounts, the Captcha tries to make sure that you are a real person, using various (and evolving) methods. In the early days of the InterWeb, Captchas were used to test out Optical Character Recognition systems - so if a text recognition system thought a phrase in some scanned text was 'Roland Jupiter-8', then a Captcha would be used to check if people read the same words. Nowadays, instead of words, Machine Learning systems that analyse photos are checked by asking people if they can see bicycles, traffic lights, busses, trains, etc. in photos, and these are compared with the computer results. So it tends to make creating fake accounts more difficult...

Finally, there is the 'Register' button. If you have filled in everything above satisfactorily (don't you just hate that word?), then you can proceed to the next stage. Notice that there is also an 'Already got an account' link, so that if you somehow thought that entering in your name, email, username, display name and passwords was the normal way to lo in to pianobook.co.uk, then you can go straight to that Login page and just enter your Username and password. A second password reset link is also on this page.  

 The Profile

When you have registered and have logged in to your new account on Pianobook.co.uk, the far right top menu bar will change so that it sats: 'account' followed by a downwards pointing arrow that drops down a menu.

 The drop-down menu has a few options:

'Profile' is the one that you use to edit your User Profile, so let's look at that page:

As you can see, I haven't used 'synthesizerwriter' for this test account, but 'Martin Russ Not Dave' instead. Remember that this is a Display Name, so it can have spaces in it, and it will appear anytime that you post, reply or publish anything - so I'm not going to be using this test account with a name like this.

Any Sample Packs (virtual instruments) that you publish will appear below this top part of the page, below that 'Edit Profile' button. As you can see, Martin Russ Not Dave has published one Sample Pack, and has 1 follower, but is not following anyone. The profile photo is an inverted and mirrored version of the 'Dave' photo, and the photo at the tope, the 'banner-photo' is the default photo of a piano keyboard.

So let's replace the banner-photo. See that blue 'Replace banner' button, with an icon of two pictures being swapped? Click on it. 

You will get another dialogue box, where you can choose a new banner-photo - click on the blue 'Choose file' button, and choose a photo... Note that is says that the size has to be at least 2000 x 500 pixels, under 2 MBytes in size, and despite what it says (and you can check experimentally) the file can be a .jpg or a .png. 

Now, banner-photo is the very first photo that you were asked to prepare in Part 1. Maybe you still like that one, or maybe you want to browse through some alternatives? Well, one source (apart from taking your own photos!) is Unsplash.com - a source of freely-usable photos. To replace the piano keyboard, I used a photo of a classic Moog modular by Steve Harvey on Unsplash ...

Once you have 'Save'd the new banner-photo with the blue 'Save' button, then the Profile web-page will have a new banner photo across the top:

The Profile page with the new banner photo.

Next, that Display Name needs changing to something sensible, and the photo of Dave needs to be changed as well, and more... The photo of Dave is the profile-photo, which has to be a .jpg (JPEG) file. But where is the blue button? Actually, you need to hover your mouse over the photo, and a blue button will appear, with the 'two files swapping position' icon that was on the banner-photo button. The dialogue box is identical, except that it states that the photo has to be square, and at least 500 pixels wide. So I chose a pixellated version of one of the photos on Gravatar:

To change the rest of the Profile web-page, you click on the blue 'Edit profile' button. You may not be surprised to learn that this opens another dialogue box, with fields to fill in!

After changing the text fields with the information that you prepared in Part 1, and saving with the blue 'Save changes' button, the revised Profile web-page is complete:

Now, we need to upload a Decent Sampler Instrument / Sample pack!

Submitting... 

Back to the menu bar, and this time, the 'Submit' button. 

On Pianobook.co.uk, you 'Submit' an Instrument / Sample Pack for evaluation, and after various checks (tuning, perhaps? keyboard colouring?...) in the 'Submit Queue', it will be published, and made available for anyone to download from your 'Profile' web-page. So your Profile web-page is the first destination that anyone searching for you and your Instruments / Sample Packs will find, and it is a catalogue of all your published Instruments / Sample Packs. So how your Profile web-page appears is very important - lots of people are going to see it. This is why the first section of this blog post has concentrated on showing you how to fill it with your photos and text. 

When you click on the 'Submit' button (which, for once, is NOT blue!), then you get taken to a page which has a banner photo at the top, containing a selection of microphones, to remind you that this is a web-site where samples are important! Scroll down the page, read the instructions, and keep scrolling down until you get to the big reveal...another dialogue box:

Once again, the text fields should have already been prepared. In this first dialogue box for the submission process, the three fields are found in the 'README.txt 'Story' file that is in the main 'MyDecentSamplerStuff' folder. You can see that I have copied and pasted the relevant fragments of text from the README.txt file for my 'Drone Drone' Instrument / Sample Pack, into the three fields. Note that the 'Story' field requires at leat 150 characters, although many people provide a lot more than this (yes, me, guilty as charged). When you have done this, then click on the blue 'Save updates' button and you will be taken to the next dialogue box....

Choose your category!

This dialogue box is where you choose a category for your Instrument / Sample Pack by ticking a box. For some submissions this is easy, but for others it can be very difficult. The Pianobook.co.uk web-site doesn't seem to use this feature very much (there's a 'Sample Packs' menu button that shows some of these categories, for example), but as the number of Instruments / Sample Packs get larger (1,000 is the next major milestone) and goes beyond that, then ways of partitioning the available instruments / Sample Packs into manageable numbers will be increasingly important if visitors to the web-site are not going to be overwhelmed. Christian Henson has talked about using the Ratings system to help with this, apparently by allowing the best to have the most visibility... 

The next dialogue box is for photos and a video to accompany all the text...

The 'Sample Pack Image' is the '<Sample-Pack-Name>-photo.jpg' that you prepared in Part 1. It should be at least 1000 x 500 pixels, in monochrome (black and white), and be a .jpg (JPEG) or a .png (PNG) file. When you click on the blue 'Choose file' button, you just need to be looking for the 'photo' file in the 'resources' folder. 

 

The 'GUI Images' is the same procedure, but this time you are looking for the 'ui-user-interface' file in the 'resources' folder.

The 'Videos' is two text fields that need a URL and a title. I use this to provide access to a video that explains my User Interfaces (UI, or GUI, for Graphical User Interface, as it says in the dialogue box). I use the title: 'UI User Interface Video' so that people know what the video is, and you could also make the video thumbnail or the start of the video say something similar. 

Remember that those amazing individuals who produce demos for Pianobook.co.uk are going to be all over your submission, turning it into a gorgeous demonstration of how good your Instrument / Sample Pack can sound when used in context by another composer. And these people will hear your Instrument / Sample Pack fresh and without any baggage, so you may well get a very different interpretation of how it can be used, and the timbres that it can produce. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that maybe this video is a good place for instructional material on how the user interface works, how to select different timbres, etc., and not a demo of how it sounds. The web-page is organised as : Story on the Left, Demos on the right, and you don't want to confuse visitors.

There's an interesting feature that you might miss the first time you use this dialogue box. It is the small blue box on the right hand side with a '+' in it. This allows you to add up to two additional videos (for a total of three!) if you want... (When you get to three pairs of URL and Title fields, then the blue '+' box vanishes, so you can't just keep adding videos and videos forever!)

Clicking the '+' box allows up to three videos to be added to your 'Profile' web-page...

Then there's the legal stuff, where you carefully read every word of the End User Licence Agreement (EULA), making sure that you understand it completely, and then tick three boxes in a checklist to confirm that you have done stuff. 

Read, tick, tick, tick....Next!

The first bit is easy - just a few minutes of reading the first time, and after that (for your next Instrument / Sample Pack!), then just checking that the EULA hasn't been updated. 

The checkboxes are interesting. 

ONE The first one is Kontakt-specific, and doesn't apply to Decent Sampler Instruments / Sample Packs - but I tick it anyway, for completeness (Who wants an empty tick-box?). Some people might be confused because the word 'unticked' is included in the explanatory text, but there's definitely a tick required in this tick box.

TWO The second is confirming that you have created a single .zip file, and this is essential if you want to be able to upload your submission in the next (and final) dialogue box... So this is a tick as well. 

(You have been following this, haven't you? You have double compressed your folder and have created the '20220226-MyDecentSampleStuff-YourName-V1.zip', haven't you?)

THREE The third is agreeing to the Terms and Conditions, which are on the same page as the EULA, and you probably already read them anyway, since they are just after the EULA and you tend to just keep reading through that sea of text... and so this is a tick as well. 

Once all three tick boxes are ticked, you can click on the blue 'next' button and go to the final dialogue box...

The final dialogue... for now...

The blue 'Choose file' button is what you need to click first. Choose your .zip file ('20220226-MyDecentSampleStuff-YourName-V1.zip'), and it will appear as shown in the screenshot above.

This is a good time to make sure that you selected the correct .zip file! Remember that this .zip file is NOT inside the 'MyDecentSampleStuff' folder! it is at the same level, so you may need to go back up the folder hierarchy by one level...

Then tick the 'Decent Sampler' tick-box, and you are ready to press the blue 'Upload your zip file' button.

The grey/gray bar will show progress uploading your .zip file to Pianobook.co.uk. As always, the longer the file, the more time it will take. Faster broadband will reduce the time it takes to upload. 

The first time I uploaded a 2 Gigabyte (actually Gibibyte, but that's a totally different blog post!) file, I worried that this would be too big for Pianobook.co.uk to cope with, but remember that they are used to receiving very large files! Huge files for you are everyday for them...

Tidying Up

Sorry, you aren't quite finished. Not yet.

Yes, your .zip file has been received, and is in the 'Submit Queue' being analysed and processed, but there's a couple of things that still need to be done...

Go to your Profile web-page, and right at the bottom of the page, you should find a 'Your Pending Submisions' area with your brand new Instrument / Sample Pack. Click on that (the green will go pink) and the web-page for that Instrument will open... 

(Yes, this isn't from the test account, because I don't want to actually upload a test .zip file. Instead, this is the 'Submit Queue' from my 'synthesizerwriter' account on Pianobook.co.uk, showing two versions of 'Drone Drone' waiting to be processed. Yes, I made several updates very quickly!)

And this is the 'Pending' page that only you see whilst your .zip file is in the 'Submit Queue'. There's a pink banner across the top of the page, and you can see the Sample Pack Name (Drone Drone in this case), the Description / Tag Line (Not the 1980's any more...), and the 'photo', as well as the 'Story'. 

Now, before Aril 2022, this was the point where you would notice that the 'Story' doesn't look right...

All the Carriage Returns and Line Feeds would have been removed, and so there would be just one long piece of text, with no paragraphs, no 'white space'. You would then need to fix this after you had uploaded a .zip file and it hd been approved (you get a 'Congratulations' email) and then placed into the 'Submit Queue', and appears as Pending in your personal 'Profile' page.

Okay, so after April 2022, the carriage returns, line feeds and various other characters were no longer removed, so there's now no need to edit the text any longer...

Unfortunately...

People are very interesting. No matter how much they try to make a piece of text perfect, with no typos, correct spelling, good grammar, no swearing, not too many exclamations marks!!!, and more, then the more likely it is that one of these will sneak past them and get into the text you have just uploaded. So, although the text that you see at this point is no longer a solid block of text, it is almost a certainty that when you read it, then you will find a typo, some bad spelling... etc. So although the April fix makes it easier, there's something inherent in the human psyche that means that you will probably find something that needs to be fixed in your text... 

To fix it, you need to scroll down, past the 'Story', past the UI Video, and past the GUI screenshot. There , just before the Ratings and Reviews, you will find the 'Sample Pack' control panel.

These blue buttons are the key to fixing any problems or missions that you find after you have submitted the .zip file. From left to right, you can edit:

- The text fields: Sample Pack Name, Description (tag line), and the 'Story'.

- The photo for the Instrument / Sample Pack (there's a typo here, although you could argue that the 'photo' is in the same place as the 'banner' on your Profile web-page...)

- The videos (up to three, remember). Videos are rarely correct first time, so this allows you to add some more.

- The UI screenshot. Again, it is only after you have uploaded the .zip file that you notice the glaring error in the UI screenshot.

To fix the 'Story' text, you use the blue 'Edit text' button. This opens... a dialogue box!

The screenshot above shows the 'after' view. What you start with looks like this:

Drone Drone? Is it pronounced: 'Durone Durone', perhaps? Could this refer to an 80s band? 'o'='a'? 'e'= (Base 64? URL encoding? ) Or is it a recording of a noisy flying device? Zzzzzzzz...

And all you do is just add 'Returns' in to break it up into the lines that you had in the original text file for the 'Story'. 

Now the text field is quite small, but there's another of those 'not obvious at first glance' features at play here. Look in the lower right hand corner of the text field, and you will see two little diagonal lines - these allow you to expand the text field downwards so that editing is much easier!

(In case you were wondering why things happened in April 2022, well, I put in a bug report for the loss of the carriage returns and line feeds... This may, or my not, have had something to do with them no longer being removed after April 2022. I like to think that I might have just nudged things along ever so infinitesimally!)

You have now completed the Submission process for a Decent Sampler instrument / Sample Pack for publishing on Pianobook.co.uk.

Completion

When your submission has passed through the whole publishing process, a new box will appear on your Profile web-page:

Your Profile web-page should now have the Instrument / Sample Pack on it.

My apologies for the Kontakt Instrument / Sample Pack shown here - my test account only has this on it. 

In the next part, Part 3, I will look at what happens when you need to update a Decent Sampler Instrument / Sample Pack... and I'm still working on that...

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