Unlike many other software synths, Falcon does not have a global set of macros, which would facilitate global MIDI controller assignments. It’s a tradoff between flexibility and ease of use.
So a great enhancement to Falcon would be to provide smart ways of assigning standard MIDI controllers to programs where feasible.
In the meantime, I am developing an application that edits Falcon program files to do this. There are some Falcon programs for which the application does not work, or does not work perfectly. (More on that below.) However, I have so far got it working for the great majority of Falcon Factory programs. I’m working on some additional sound banks. For the user, the time-consuming part is that every sound bank program to be modified needs first to be saved to a file! Once that has been done, the application can process a whole hierarchy of folders of program files at once.
The application takes two main approaches to assigning MIDI CCs to macros.
For Info pages of standard appearance: Assign a specified series of continuous MIDI controllers and a specified series of toggle button MIDI contollers to continuous macros and toggle macros respectively. The MIDI CC numbers are usually assigned top to bottom, left to right, relative to the positions of the macros on the Info page. For some Info page layouts, left to right, top to bottom works better.
Example: For continuous macros, I”ve specified MIDI CCs 31, 32, 33, 34, 11, 36, 37 etc. For toggle macros, I’ve specified MIDI CCs 112, 113, 114 etc. These are mapped, from left to right, to the macros on the Info page of ‘Falcon Factory\Keys\Clavi Station’ as follows: Filter Cutoff (continuous) 31; Filter Resonance (continuous) 32; Delay On/Off (toggle) 112; Delay Mix (continuous) 33; SparkVerb On/Off (toggle) 113; SparkVerb Mix (continuous) 34. (The macros are all in a row in this program. So it does not matter whether I assign the MIDI CCs top to bottom first or left to right first.)
For Info pages of non-standard appearance, whose layouts are specified in scripts: A custom set of MIDI CC assignments is specified in the application for each script-specified layout, which may apply to a whole sound bank or to one or more category folders within a sound bank. This is where things can go wrong. Because I don’t have access to the scripts in sound banks, I have to asssume that any given layout script is configured in a standard way by all the programs that use it. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
Expressions of Interest
The application is a work in progress. And I’m developing it for my own use in the first instance. But I’d be happy to share it on an open source basis. I have been developing the application on Windows. It should run on macOS too, though I would probably need help preparing and testing a macOS installer. I need to make a disclaimer that, if UVI change the format in which programs are stored to file, that could stop the application from working, possibly irreparably. Falcon users are welcome to place expressions of interest here.
