Unisyn

Discussion of issues related to MOTU's Sysex Editor/Librarian program.

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midifool
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2006 1:14 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Atlanta

Unisyn

Post by midifool »

Has any one here upgraded from an old version of Unisyn? I had an older version that I used back in the freeMIDI days. I'm thinking about f doing an upgrade, but I'm not sure that the functionality of the new program justifies it. Can someone give me examples of what they use it for?
Aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz 4GB RAM - MacBook 2.4GHz 4GB RAM - DP7.1 - Logic Studio 9 - MOTU 828mkII - MOTU MicroLite - MOTU Electric Keys, BPM & MX4 - M-Audio Axiom 61, Trigger Finger & KeyRig25 - Spectrasonics Trilogy, Stylus, & Trillium, Native Instruments Komplete 6
ifwuh
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Feb 28, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Upgraded to 2.1.1

Post by ifwuh »

I upgraded from 1.04B2 to 1.14 to 1.5 to 2.11 (were there any other versions ;-) ?
I found Unisyn 2 to be very much different, so different in fact that it wasn't at first
usable, at least not in the same way I had been using Unisyn 1.5 (a few device
profiles I use had been rewritten and worked differently that I had to relearn the
synth from Unisyn2's way of thinking, and it wasn't the synth that changed ! )
i Upgraded to get compatibility in OS X and for just that Unisyn 2 is nice.
It's still unisyn and it's working in OSX.

I use Unisyn to get, and send system exclusive patch data from and to my synths.
to Save "snapshots" of my whole MIDI rig on a project by project basis.
Back to the 'so much different it's not usable' stuff, unisyn 2 will
not open previous version "Performance" files. It will quit out. At least for me.
So, I had to rebuild all performances from scratch by first opening
said Performance file in Unisyn 1.5 sent it to the synths, then switch to
Unisyn 2 and do a "get all" from the synths and save it as a Unisyn 2 snapshot.
(old unisyn called it performance, new unisyn calls it snapshot)
I am glad I have Unisyn2 in case I need it, but I am also glad my days
of working with hardware synths and system exclusive are pretty much done.
The years of Unisyn 1.14 and 1.5 were fun though.

Many threads hint that Unisyn is dead. It hasn't been updated in years
and a few threads on this forum talk about how no one at motu is working on
it, that there was a lot of work done that never made it out to the public and never will.
it's sad because all the multiple device "Universal" editor librarians are dying off, at least on the Mac.
Emagic's Sounddiver is dead (but still works if you have a working XSKey).
Opcode's Galaxy is dead (but still works non-copy protected in OS9) and Unisyn is in limbo.

What "functionality" of the new program are you talking about specifically ?
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