New Realtime arranger software announcement

[mikf]

This was 2016, so presumably everything since then is class compliant. I imagine Yamaha continue to offer drivers in case people have very old computers they have not updated to latest operating systems.
Mike

[gerarde]

I know the Genos is class compliant as I am using Mobilesheets Pro, connected with a printer cable.
No drivers were necessary to get this to work.
That is partly why I wanted to see a demo before I figure out what to do about seeing my song sheets.

Gerard

[groovyband.live]

This was 2016, so presumably everything since then is class compliant. I imagine Yamaha continue to offer drivers in case people have very old computers they have not updated to latest operating systems.
Mike

Actually the opposite is the case. The Yamaha driver ONLY supports recent OSes (up to Win 10). Win XP and Vista support has been dropped. So apparently they manufacture a driver only for the OSes that do NOT need it.

And they do NOT advertise a major selling point (class compliancy) where a prospective buyer would look: specification list, user manual.

Very strange way of doing businness. 

[Roy_T]

Yamaha, Roland, Korg, etc. provide proprietary USB-MIDI drivers for their high end keyboards because the generic ("Class Compliant") drivers do not fully support the Standard MIDI Spec.  Specifically, they do not support the Flow Control (X-ON / X-OFF) that was used in the old RS-232C based 5-pin-DIN MIDI protocol, to prevent receive buffer overflow on large file and/or complex Sy*** transfers.  Since the Close DAW Integration of these high end keyboards rely heavily on very complex Sy*** communication, they can not rely on the generic ("Class Compliant") drivers to prevent receive buffer overflow.  Therefore they offer their proprietary drivers for those owners who prefer/require Close DAW Integration.  Even so, use of the proprietary drivers is still an option.  These high end keyboards have a menu selectable switch to determine which driver (generic/proprietary) you want the keyboard to work with.

I still have the Roland proprietary Win-XP/Win-Vista/Win-7 driver, that I downloaded to provide for Close Integration between my Jupiter-50 and Juno-Gi with Sonar.  I used that driver successfully with all three of those operating systems, but since Microsoft has withdrawn all support for Win-XP and Win-Vista, I find it only natural that keyboard manufacturers have withdrawn associated support from recent versions of their proprietary drivers.  Likewise, I would expect them to do the same with Win-7 support in the not too distant future.  I had this same experience with the proprietary driver for my Yamaha Motif XS-6 for Close Integration with Steinberg's Cubebase-AI.

Contrary to the erroneous assumptions of many, who lack experience in this area, the fact that a manufacturer provides a proprietary driver for a particular keyboard model, is in no way an indication of a design deficiency in that model, but rather is an appropriate reaction to the failure of the "Class Compliant" designers to fully support the Standard MIDI Spec.

Roy

[overover]

@groovyband.live

You can find additional information about USB connection / USB driver in the following Manuals on the Genos download site:

• "Computer-related Operations"
• "Smart Device Connection Manual for iOS (iPhone/iPad Connection Manual)"

https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/keyboards/arranger_workstations/genos/downloads.html#product-tabs


To connect to Android devices, another Manual is available:

• "Smart Device Connection Manual for Android"

https://usa.yamaha.com/support/manuals/index.html?l=en&c=&k=android


Genos and newer Tyros / PSR-S models ARE USB-MIDI "Class Compliant". This is also necessary for use with iOS and Android devices. BUT for the best possible functionality with Windows or MacOS it is recommended to install the proprietary Yamaha USB-MIDI Driver (especially to work with BOTH USB-MIDI-Receive-Ports).


P.S.
I use the 32-bit version of the current Yamaha USB-MIDI Driver (V3.1.4) also with Windows XP, and it works fine ...

https://usa.yamaha.com/support/updates/index.html?c=keyboards&k=usb-midi


Best regards,
Chris

[mikf]

And they do NOT advertise a major selling point (class compliancy) where a prospective buyer would look: specification list, user manual.

Since it has never been raised by anyone before, it is obviously not a major selling point.

Mike

[gerarde]

Bottom line, we need to see a demo on how this product works showing some of the functions.

[groovyband.live]

Since it has never been raised by anyone before, it is obviously not a major selling point.

Mike

It all depends to the target you want to sell an instrument.
On the official Montage specification page, there is written (bold emphasis added by me), with huge font + logo and picture:

*************

- USB Audio/MIDI Connection
Connect MONTAGE to your computer with a single USB cable and capture every nuance of your creativity into your DAW. MONTAGE's powerful USB driver can send 16 and receive 3 channels of STEREO 24 bit/44.1 kHz digital audio to/from your computer or iOS device (MONTAGE is class compliant, no driver needed!), no other hardware required!

The USB connection also features full MIDI support of 16 channels.

*************

Montage customers do care if an instrument is class compliant. And Yamaha clearly specify that it is, and you do not need a driver. And Yamaha want to be sure that the prospective customer find that information fast and painlessly.

[mikf]

It all depends to the target you want to sell an instrument.

When the release of the Genos was first 'suspected' (ie well before it was announced or specs were known) there was a huge amount of posts on this website from a small minority of members who claimed that the new keyboard needed to be a radical departure to survive in the market and appeal to 'younger' buyers. It was of course wrong, and as most of us expected the Genos was firmly targeted at the same audience as the previous generation of arrangers. Yamaha knows the market for this type of instrument, and also knows that the older generation are not dying out - they represent a constantly growing market segment because believe it or not, all young people eventually get old. And they have time and money to indulge themselves.
Does it sound good, is it easy to play .... this is what matters to the vast , vast majority of buyers of these keyboards. They don't care very much about fringe issues like up to date operating systems, compatibility, connectivity. These things are high on the agenda for many workstation buyers, but I suspect matter to about 10% or less of the arranger buyers.
Mike

[metcam]

I.m not interested in this proggie or vArranger because I don't see the value of it. I'm waiting for a proggie that can make (easily) a style out of a midifile - no offence to the ones already exist.

Regards <> Piet

And me...

[panos]

Just curious...Is it of any practical benefit of having a class complient instrument?
For example, Montage users don't have latency issues when the play their instrument in a DAW and they don't have to swith to the ASIO4ALL driver?
Because to play a game on line I had to download and install 20 to 30 gigabytes and download the updates almost every week.
To connect my psr to my computer I had to install a single driver just for oonce.
No big deal,if that's the case.

I would like to download the demo to play and listen to new styles but unfortunately I have an older psr.
If there was a video at least I would have the chance to listen to them
Good luck with your project.
In my point of view, new ideas cannot harm and always welcomed

[Jørgen]

...
And why does Yamaha provide (and develop) a proprietary driver if the device (= the arranger) can work even without?

And why does you provide and develop a software program which does not comply to de-facto standards? 
I am referring to your propritary style format... 

Jørgen

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi
Looks like a dead duck In the water for the Genos.
For the price I would not waste my time on something that the Genos has.
Far better off with Cubase and Vst if you want to go further.
Also make your own styles from midi or change the styles about on the Genos. No brainer
A fantastic easy program for making styles from midi  or from scratch on a computer would be better.
I find EMC Styleworks easiest to make styles. Just a fiddle to get the Cmaj 7th going and the right octave on instruments then bingo.Watch the Casm!!
For those mixing your songs on the Genos there is a new standard  called LUFS, just for laughs It Is for sites like Soundcloud, Spotify , You Tube Etc  Sound Equalisation for the many ,not the few. Maybe tv adverts will get quieter!!


All the best
John

[mikf]

Its pretty natural in that the most knowledgeable people will come up with many of the ideas for future technology development. Unfortunately, though they are usually the power users, the technology gurus and the developers themselves and not representative of the true market for the product. Large companies spend a lot of effort trying to sift these out, but despite that I have still seen thousands of man-hours and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted developing solutions to problems that the average customer had no interest in paying for, or did not even see as a problem at all. 
Mike 

[Bachus]

I.m not interested in this proggie or vArranger because I don't see the value of it. I'm waiting for a proggie that can make (easily) a style out of a midifile - no offence to the ones already exist.

Regards <> Piet

Varranger atleast comes with its own high quallity sound sources
And plays all standar styles from yamaha, korg, roland, ketron and Gem..

Varranger is meant as an arranger module for people that have a keyboard/synth/organ/stage piano with no arranger on board..

Why anyone owning a Genos, would want to use a piece of software like this, goes beyound me.

To have any chance for success, the software prices needs to be lowered by a huge amount..

[Jørgen]

...
Why anyone owning a Genos, would want to use a piece of software like this, goes beyound me.
...

Agree. And even Tyros and PSR owners too.

I consider myself open-minded and look forward to new software coming on the market.
But I have to point out that it is problematic for this software's success if it does not support the market's de facto standards and formats.

This program
- has 500 styles in a proprietary format without import or export to market de-facto standard formats.
- have not - at least I have not found it - options or third party software to modify these 500 styles.
- the style format is unknown and un-documented.
- is new; and who knows: Will the company behind it be on the market in 2 years?

Yamaha styles - though not perfect -
- has 100,000+ styles available - of mixed quality, I agree.
- 100+ third party software programs - most are freeware - to customize these to the user's wishes.
- the style format is well known and documented.
- has been on the market at least since 1996 - PSR 8000 = 22+ years!

But, of course the choice is yours... 

Jørgen

Edit: Typo corrected

[Toril S]

Good points Jørgen!

[mikf]

Well if the styles were compatible and could play on your arranger why would you buy their arranger software which needs connection to an arranger to play
Reminds me of the old joke about the space shuttle ......
Why do we need the Space Shuttle? So we can get to the Space Station.
Why do we need the Space Station? So the Shuttle has somewhere to go. 

[Toril S]

Good point!

[groovyband.live]

For those who have downloaded the demo with the link on this thread.

Following the feedback from customers and testers, there is a new public build (18120) with these release notes:

* Improved style rendering engine on some corner cases
* Tweaked chord recognition algorithm
* Partially changed "Invert RH Vce" button logic to improve smoothness while performing
* Increased multi-threading (up to 4 cores) on previously single threaded code paths
* Reduced style file size on disk (-33%, from ~18 to ~12 kb) thanks to a more efficient encoding
* Corrected a couple of bugs

As usual, it can be (re)downloaded here: https://www.groovyband.live/#demo_download
This is, of course, a free update for existing customers (who have already been notified by email).

The preferred and fastest channel (continuously monitored) for features requests and bugs reports is our "contact us" page: https://www.groovyband.live/contact

Thanks for testing our software.

[groovyband.live]

New build available. Here is the press release:

22nd February 2019

Groovyband Live! is pleased to announce the availability of a significant update (build 19020) which delivers many new unique features that further strengthen its value proposition in the market. Following the policy of continuous improvement, this is the second update we deliver in 4 months from original launch.
Here are the highlights:

•   Added 70 new styles, bringing the total to 620. All the styles are perfectly integrated and supports all the advanced features Groovyband Live! offers. We have also further tweaked the whole body of styles.
Everything is balanced and sounds good out of the box, to give you immediate gratification.

•   Added support for a pedalboard, in addition to the two manuals. Now Groovyband Live! Is perfectly suited to build a home organ setup around it, complete with state of the art automatic arrangements and registrations. You can also use a midified existing organ console as the source of both manuals and pedalboard (as well as pistons and other physical controls).
Alternatively, you can hook a second keyboard controller and/or a pedalboard to your Yamaha arranger. The pedalboard can be substituted with a third keyboard if desired.
As usual, a fourth midi input is available for additional control surfaces / midi equipment to add physical controls to your setup.

•   Virtual round robin on all drumkits (enabled by default, can be selectively disabled wherever desired). Groovyband Live! subtly randomly varies the pitch, ADSR envelope and filter cutoff of every stroke of every kit piece every time a note is played (as well as the velocity, see later). No two hits are identical, and the whole drum track sounds livelier, as played by a human (who never repeat himself) and not by a sequencer.

•   The velocity of every played note (both melody and drum tracks) can be varied randomly to humanize the execution (intensity freely adjustable). The randomization is smart and takes into account the spatial/temporal position of played notes. Closely played notes are not allowed to be randomized independently, to mimic the fact that, for example, a strummed guitar can be strummed with varying intensity, but all the strings within a given strum (hand movement) are either all played softly or loudly. You cannot play softly a string and loudly the string immediately below it stroked a few milliseconds after the first one!

•   The noises of mega voices are randomly selected from a pool of similar sounding noises, when available, every time one is played. A looping track never repeats identical, as it is the case in the real world.

•   The volume of "noises" in mega voices can be adjusted independently of the melody notes. You can therefore (de)emphasize at will this effect, as well as disable it completely.

•   A mega voice can be substituted with another (similar, i.e.: a guitar with another guitar) mega voice, or with a regular voice. Groovyband Live! knows every articulation mapping and makes the necessary adjustments in real time to select the best match among the articulations and noises available in the destination voice. You can therefore broadly expand the choices available when revoicing the parts to suits your needs.

•   To further tweak the final result when revoicing parts (or to match your taste), there is a single knob comp/expander control. With this control you can compress or expand the velocity of the notes of a track to match the built-in dynamics of a particular voice (which might be different than the original voice dynamics the track was sequenced for).

By playing with virtual round robin, velocity humanization, randomization and volume of noises, dynamics compression-expansion, you can impart to every track the right amount of "imperfection" and dynamics to credibly emulate a real human player. All these settings are part of the voice parameters and, as all voice parameters, these can be independently customized (if desired) for every section of each style.
This flexibility further compounds with the availability of 8 main sections to play with, easily duplicable and movable at the touch of a button, editable in depth from the main screen with a native touch interface and real time swapping of the played pattern. You can completely change the feeling of a playing track/section while the sequencer is playing so that you immediately hear what every edit sounds like. And to preserve your edits while experimenting, you can quickly save/recall the playing style in/from temporary scratch memory slots or disk. This is seamless and, as everything in Groovyband Live!, does NOT stop the sequencer.

•   You can now edit/replace all the voices in a multi voice track (blue background) as you are used to do with ordinary single voiced tracks (white/green background).

•   We have added scratchpad voice memory slots also in the Acmp Voices panel. You can therefore easily and faster experiment variations or exchange voices with other parts (aux/lead) or styles without forcibly saving a voice to disk.

This features update is still free of charge for all existing customers and keeps their investment current on the leading edge.

Everybody interested can download for free a demo (including all the 620 styles) and play with it at will, so that you exactly know what you get before buying: https://www.groovyband.live/#demo_download

To know what Groovyband Live! offers we have a Features in Depth section: https://www.groovyband.live/features/429/

The ultimate reference and detailed explanation of every feature is the online user manual: https://www.groovyband.live/user-manual/

Groovyband Live! Team

[michaelsjoholm]

Crashes instantly on my Windows 10, "Unrecoverable error during Startup". No uninstall in control panel. No icon on desktop or start menu, had to start it from folder

[groovyband.live]

Crashes instantly on my Windows 10, "Unrecoverable error during Startup". No uninstall in control panel. No icon on desktop or start menu, had to start it from folder

You probably did not install it correctly (icons on desktop are created automatically by the installer). For sure you did not read the manual (the installation chapter also clearly explains how to uninstall the program). If you start it from folder you miss the right privileges and the software will NOT start, with the error message you see (course of action explained in the manual).

Do not be lazy. I suggest to do your homework again, and possibly use the support on the Web site (more infos will be required, including the log file).

Current build is 19021.

[hammer]

I installed this program on my windows 10 machine with no issues at all.  I have not tried to connect a keyboard to the computer yet.

Deane

[Tyros5Mad]

If the groovyband software does not support Yamaha styles it will not be interesting for most users of this web site.

Software needs to cater to a need in the potential user community. As Yamaha arranger keyboard players this community's baseline need is the Yamaha style or a midi file that can be used on a Yamaha arranger keyboard.

I don't see a problem with people trying to promote some new software but here you folks from groovyband have chosen the wrong audience I think.

Good luck with your software.

Regards, Richard

[groovyband.live]

Software needs to cater to a need in the potential user community. As Yamaha arranger keyboard players this community's baseline need is the Yamaha style or a midi file that can be used on a Yamaha arranger keyboard.

Richard,

thanks for expressing your point of view. We do care about (prospective) customers' opinion. We care so much, that even in the splash screen of our software, we invite everyone to email us their wishes or improvements ideas.

Our software CAN actually be used with any Yamaha arranger keyboard, even better, it IS designed to be used with such hardware.

The whole point of spending (hard earned) money on our software (or any other add-on "software") is to be able to do something more/better than you can with your baseline hardware (possibly augmented with free tools/software).

Our ambition is to offer something more/better than your current experience. And this cannot be achieved with the existing 20+ years old system. In a previous post we explained why. And the original is always better than a copy, arriving 20 years late to the party.

If you are content/satisfied with what you have, then you are in a good position: no need to change habits (and spend more money).

But many people aren't satisfied. We see it from the number of persons surfing our site every day (and downloading the free demo). Some of these people (mostly from USA and UK) have clicked a link on this forum (this thread currently has ~7k hits). Most contacts (coming from non English speaking countries: most of the world) have clicked a link from somewhere else. A sizeable number is people returning to our site through a bookmark on their browser, direct typing, or google search.

To everybody we offer the OPPORTUNITY to download a FREE demo and make their mind at their own pace.

More choices are always good to have (even if you do not like most of them).

We would also like to hear from people who have actually tried the demo and didn't like it. You learn more from (constructive) criticism rather than easy compliments.

[Tyros5Mad]

I've had a look at your software. Here's some basic feedback.

- The UI looks pretty good but I have to wonder if all the complexity is necessary. When you select a built-in style on the keyboard it is already set up with effects and voices and variations ready to go. I can add some multi-pad sounds and then I have a pretty solid backing for the song I want to play.
- Styles: the lack of support for Yamaha styles will be the biggest problem for your software. My Genos already has 550 styles built in. If I cannot find the exact style I am looking for, there are literally thousands of free styles available on the internet - indeed on this very site. We can also make our own styles. Your Platinum version comes with 640 styles. At $875.00 Aud that is very expensive - for me too expensive... Can we make new styles with your software?
- Many players, myself included, are vocalists so we want backing tracks with lyrics that we can use with our keyboards. In fact I wanted it so much I have written my own software to create backing tracks with lyrics. The software is currently being tested and will be released for free soon. Can we add lyrics with your software?

So, as I said earlier, good luck with your software.

Regards, Richard

[rodrigo.b]

Richard,

thanks for expressing your point of view. We do care about (prospective) customers' opinion. We care so much, that even in the splash screen of our software, we invite everyone to email us their wishes or improvements ideas.

Our software CAN actually be used with any Yamaha arranger keyboard, even better, it IS designed to be used with such hardware.

The whole point of spending (hard earned) money on our software (or any other add-on "software") is to be able to do something more/better than you can with your baseline hardware (possibly augmented with free tools/software).

Our ambition is to offer something more/better than your current experience. And this cannot be achieved with the existing 20+ years old system. In a previous post we explained why. And the original is always better than a copy, arriving 20 years late to the party.

If you are content/satisfied with what you have, then you are in a good position: no need to change habits (and spend more money).

But many people aren't satisfied. We see it from the number of persons surfing our site every day (and downloading the free demo). Some of these people (mostly from USA and UK) have clicked a link on this forum (this thread currently has ~7k hits). Most contacts (coming from non English speaking countries: most of the world) have clicked a link from somewhere else. A sizeable number is people returning to our site through a bookmark on their browser, direct typing, or google search.

To everybody we offer the OPPORTUNITY to download a FREE demo and make their mind at their own pace.

More choices are always good to have (even if you do not like most of them).

We would also like to hear from people who have actually tried the demo and didn't like it. You learn more from (constructive) criticism rather than easy compliments.

I download the demo, I like very much the results but I don't like the GUI interface. I hope you can also incorporate the posibility to play midi files or styles from other brands. For example Korg has RX sounds with I think is very similar to Megavoice sounds, so maybe you can create an algorithm or something that analyzes and convert the styles that has RX sounds to playback correctly with megavoice sounds

[groovyband.live]

I download the demo, I like very much the results but I don't like the GUI interface.

Thanks Rodrigo for your feedback.

Could you please tell us what is your arranger and the computer you are using Groovyband Live! with? (Desktop, laptop, tablet, with touch screen?).

We would also like to know more details about what you liked (and why) and what you did not.

[rodrigo.b]

Thanks Rodrigo for your feedback.

Could you please tell us what is your arranger and the computer you are using Groovyband Live! with? (Desktop, laptop, tablet, with touch screen?).

We would also like to know more details about what you liked (and why) and what you did not.

I use the PSR S970 and PC, I like the styles and the features like virtual round robin, but I can't say more because I think I will need to have more time to test all the program features.