In terms of Expressive E’s own presence at NAMM, I didnt really notice any formal videos of them announcing anything in particular at NAMM this year. I did see an informal video where someone walking round the show happened to ask Christopher some questions at one point during a very long youtube stream, and from that it sounded like their priorities in terms of Osmose development were to improve the presets system, and offer users a way of managing presets from a computer using an app that isnt the Haken editor app. And as usual they acknowledged that a better editor for the synth engine is on the list of priorities, but is a significant undertaking.
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If it is not too much trouble to find that informal video again, it would be interesting to get a link to it!
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If someone wants an app to manage presets other than the Haken Editor, there is my VCV Rack plugin: Announcing pachde (#d) HC-One beta
Doesn’t have quite everything people want, but it’s quite useful. I’m getting ready to release it to the Rack library - just buttoning up docs and a little more testing.
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I wasnt sure if I could find it again but I did. Dont expect too much, it was just an informal chat and there was some confused questioning about MaxForLive/lack of Max knowledge in there, along with some failure to detect sarcasm about Windows which didnt exactly help the conversation to flow:
Sadly you probably wont learn anything beyond what I already described earlier so I dont recommend actually watching the video but here it is anyway.
Go to the 26 minutes 41 seconds stage of this video:
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On watching it again, beyond what I already said there was a hint about adding more modules to the engine but theres no detail and that could mean a number of different things, and they dont want to be bullish about timescales. Its clear they are well aware of limitations to the user experience of the editor, but a better librarian/preset system is first on the agenda.
Haken progress is painfully slow, Im still waiting for the thing that lets you load your own ‘sample turned into additive bank’ (my dodgy wording) thing that someone involved with that (not-Osmose-specific) side of things first mentioned years ago.
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Since I mentioned the additive stuff I may as well link to some examples. But I have no idea if the tool to make your own will actually come out this year, they have been farting around with this stuff for years without, it seems, any commercial pressure to actually release something useable.
And these videos arent exactly polished demos.
The Continuucon talk about this is the typical deep nerdy stuff. I think there are some actual demos of some patches using it when you get past the half hour mark, though these particular demos are very much not Osmose specific and arent designed with the Osmose playing surface in mind at all:
And there is this earlier one which is in French (I dont speak that language) but gives you a glimpse of the prototype tool and some different sound demos:
I expect most Osmose owners dont currently even know this feature even exists (and that all we are missing is the converter/importer), further reducing any commercial pressure to actually release something. Most Osmose owners will only know about this if they’ve ever had patches such as Additive Choir failing to make any noise, and had to be told where to find the obscure ‘Remake QSPI Data’ option in the Haken editor to get it working. Because that patch uses the existing ‘additive bank’ thats been included, and used by some Eaganmatrix patches, since that feature was first added to the engine, well before the Osmose first came out.
Anyway I should certainly have used the term resynthesis when I mentioned this feature.
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A web search for ‘Mahling phrase’ (which was used to create the data thats already been included since this feature was added to the engine) reveals an existing thread right here on this very forum:
And an Osmose patch someone made for people to use to test that this data is on their Osmose properly, and to explore it in a way that factory Osmose presets dont:
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Progress has pretty slow on these things. It is a small group of people working on it, and most of them have other jobs. I think Christophe is the one working on the spectral set software, and he’s been very busy with le Voix de Luthier, a gig with Hans Zimmer for Dune 2, etc.
I do think the pace will pick up a little. Lippold retired from the University not long ago to devote more time to EM/Continuum development.
I have a preview of some of the changes in the next firmware coming before Continuucon and there some new things in there specifically in support of custom spectral sets. That doesn’t mean the feature will be complete then, but it is progress
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Thank you for digging it up! 
It was relevant information to me and it is always good to hear it oneself to interpret the information. I am very interested in what changes may happen to preset management and editor - and on what platforms - so I really apprected it.
Regarding the resynthesis, it was discussed quite at length by Haken Audio during Superbooth 2021 so I kind of anticipated it to show up not too long after the introduction of the EMM. Since then, though, I have understood it is probably better to just sit back an look forward to it with curious patience.
The link is to a perfromance/lecture from the fair and around 17 minutes into the video Edmund Eagan plays the Continuumini/EMM with custom sample resynthesized in real-time, with Rob Schwimmer on Osmose. I think it is the most clear use of it I have heard yet!
(13) Haken Audio & La Voix du Luthier – SUPERBOOTH21 Gesprächskonzert (lecture concert) - YouTube
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And so the first collaboration has been revealed. KiloHearts.
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it’s a good deal… Phase Plant & the 4 preset bundles for 99 euros…
fyi: Phase Plant lists at 199 usd retail, but can often be had for ~99usd, sometimes with sound packs
I’ll be playing with it tonight
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Yeah I probably nearly bought it under offer in the past but something else always got ahead in my purchase queue. Now Im glad I waited. Just bought it, very excited to try it in a little while. Am deliberately teasing myself by watching various Phase Plant videos first.
I’ll be using the same controllers they used in their demo videos, Push 3 and Osmose. WIll be interesting to see how they tackled the sound design devilish details we touched upon in regards different controllers earlier in this thread.
I see they are chucking around a “MPE EE certified” logo in the parketing for this pack too. Probably mostly a gimmick for marketing purposes but if it helps some of the less technical Osmose users who were in the past confused about Expressive E’s offerings and MPE/expressivity, I wont complain. Especially if the amount of preset pack options for various synths that carry that logo grows in future.
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I suppose I will try to keep this thread updated with subsequent developments, even though some of those will be discussed on their own threads.
So, after the collaboration that led to the Phase Plant stuff, we then got more of Expressive E’s own internal efforts via Noisy 2, which is marketed to Osmose owners, the broader MPE world, users of their other controller the Touche, and non-MPE use. I quite like Noisy 2, especially the expressivity-envelope interaction stuff which has some things in common with what Arturia offer in the Polybrute 12.
And even more recently we got the public release of the v2 firmware for Osmose. This includes stuff that should help users to save their various different external MIDI settings, and also paves the way for Expressive E to release a preset bank of further sounds for the built in synth engine.
It was also interesting to see them talking about future features towards the end of their video for users of v2. They didnt make the mistake of hinting at timescales for these future features, and most of what I paid attention to is all stuff that requires Haken to do their thing. It isnt clear to me whether, when Expressive E talk about an easier editor for Osmose synth presets, they are talking about something that involves their own work as opposed to stuff like the ‘specialty synths’ that Haken have already shown a bit of at Continuucon. If I had to guess, I would suggest that Expressive E will want to do their own thing in this space at some point, but it would make sense to me if this was still built atop Hakens current ongoing development efforts, ie they need Haken to help lay the foundations for that, largely in ways we have already seen hinted at from the Haken side of things.
I already posted the video that mentions the future near the end, but here it is again anyway, hopefully this link will start playback of the video at the relevant point:
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The next EE MPE Certified partnership synth bundle and preset deal has been announced:
Hive 2 with 300 MPE presets, branded as the ‘Hive 2 expressive suite’: (with a cheaper price option for those who already own Hive 2)
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And another one:
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they are really cranking out these preset packs!
It’s an interesting strategy… EE have quite a bit of diversity, hardware/software/presets.
I guess, they have an ‘in house’ sound designer, so it makes sense to keep them ‘busy’ doing presets for other synths (and hardware/software dev cycle is very long)
btw: no slight, I think its a really great thing…good to have diversity, and also great for customer base to have lots of choice in terms for MPE ready synths out of the box.
its a really interesting approach, that we have not really seen before.
good luck to EE, I think its great !
(ok, Embodme, have released presets for other synths, but not on this scale)
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Yeah its really helping fill a large gap caused by the previous situation where we ended up with a large number of MPE synths that didnt come with any MPE-specific presets.
The stuff they made a lot longer ago with UVI Falcon has quite a lot of similarities to their current approach really. Albeit that older stuff was marketed and bundled in a different way, mostly because with that system they could make things that resembled instruments with their own UI, that ran on the free UVI Workstation. Though for Falcon owners like me its really the same sort of experience as having a load of MPE presets made available for that synth, just like their more recent efforts.
Beyond the world of Expressive E, I dont think the situation was great, the following isnt a completely exhaustive list but its my first stab at describing what else was out there in terms of MPE presets:
Lots of stuff for synths associated with Roli, eg Equator, this is probably the only other source that I would describe as abundant.
The Cherry Audio synths that have MPE support tend to have a MPE category in their factory presets. Unfortunately they really seem to have lost interest in including any MPE support at all in their more recent offerings.
Ableton made some MPE presets as part of their whole Push 3 and MPE-ization of their built in instruments drive. But theres a lot more they could do in this area in future in terms of quantity via additional packs, no idea if they will.
Arturia stuck their toes in the water by offering an expressive-focussed pack for Pigments, but I found it to be rather a mixed bag where many of the presets didnt seem like brilliantly designed MPE presets to me, although some were. And given the number of their V collection synths that support MPE, there is a huge amount of untapped potential remaining here.
Theres obviously the community-driven Surge XT Linnstrument stuff, which I am guilty of not paying sufficient attention to really. I’ve got no personal experience of the Embodme stuff you mentioned either.
Beyond that I think theres mostly just a few other specialty synths like Expressive E’s own Noisy 2, SWAM stuff which is sort of in a different category really, Anyma-V (no longer available) and maybe a few others that Ive forgotten or not tried.
Which leaves rather a lot of other MPE-capable soft and hard synths where if we are lucky we mostly just have the starting point of MPE pitch automatically working, and presets that were designed to support aftertouch/poly aftertouch sometimes not being too far wide of the mark for what we’d want from thr pressure dimension of MPE.
Please do let me know if I’ve forgotten some other synths that have MPE presets, either as part of the factory content or as additional packs. I would say the same for 3rd party packs being sold by individuals, although I dont think I’ve seen any individual 3rd party sound designers selling MPE-specific packs for hardware or software synths yet.
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Now that I think about it, I maybe should have included a whole bunch of Dawesome synths that support MPE, although its been ages since I actually checked how much of the factory content was sufficiently wired up for expressive playing out of the box.
Tomofon may also qualify, since there is some factory or addon content that has expressive or MPE in the name, but I dont really know where to set the cutoff point for what counts as more than a token gesture of MPE-content in terms of quantity. There might be a bunch of other synths that are in this sort of territory, including some ipad synths, I forget. Probably easier to just not mention them unless theres a fairly substantial quantity of MPE presets.
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Basically there have been no significant contributions since April 2023 other than Max’s Surge XT MPE sound design tutorials:
I have already provided feedback to Max about the tutorials on its respective KVR Audio Forum thread and attempted to learn from them myself, but they seem to be incredibly difficult to grasp for me, so I am focusing on other resource-efficient activities instead.
They’ve done it again. Myth expressive suite:
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