We are pleased to announce the newest 1.4.4 beta version of Xenia.
https://dsp56300.com/builds/xenia/beta/
We have fixed a few issues that are described in the 📋┃xenia-changelog, but the big news here is the addition of the Wave Editor which opens up the User Wavetable and User Wave functionality of the emulator. We will be adding a post to the website explaining this in greater detail soon, but please read below for some of the basics.
Xenia is of course an emulation of the microWAVE 2/XT synthesizer which is a wavetable synth. There are plenty of ROM waves and wavetables built in, but Waldorf provided the user with some user-addressable locations for their own Waves, and the ability to combine them into a "Wavetable" by adding waves into slots within a "Wave Control Table". This was not really possible to do directly from the UI of the synth, and required 3rd party software to effectively achieve this. Most of that software is old/gone and unsupported today, so we wanted to bring back the ability for users to experience this with our emulator.
We highly recommend that you PLEASE read the Waldorf manual for the microwave2/XT to get a better understanding of how the synth itself works with wavetable/wave control table/wave to get a better understanding of how this works and how to use them in a patch. This will help you better understand how the synth itself works and give you a much easier time and better results when making your own.
You can draw your own waveforms or modify existing ones, then assign them to slots in one of the User wavetables by dragging them to slots in the Wave Control Table or right-clicking and assigning them to a specific location. The Wave Editor in Xenia is designed mainly around drag and drop with some right-click context options in various places, so a fair amount of exploration is recommended. Start with examining the ROM WaveTables to get an idea of how they are constructed so you have a better idea of how this works. You can move, export, clear, etc things in the user slots; again, please explore.
These User wavetables then can be assigned in your patch just like the ROM tables are, and they are selectable in the same manner in the plugin UI on the main page with the "Wavetable" red knob. When you save a patch, all related data (including User Wavetable/Wave Control Table and User Waves used in that patch) are saved along with that patch, and this can be loaded into Xenia, or even exported as .syx or .mid files and imported into the microwave2/XT hardware.
We have added a new folder called 'wavetables' to the plugin config folder structure to contain the ROM and User wavetables/waves, much like the "flash" does in the hardware. This is persistent, however when loading a patch that contains data it will overwrite these "memory locations" just as it does in the hardware. This folder on first use will need to populate data/files for the first time, so you may see some "Dumping..." messages in the LCD the first time you navigate to the Wave tab. This creates .syx files for each object in that folder. If you ever want to "clear your memory" and start over, you can simply delete that folder and re-run the plugin to reinitialize that with factory-fresh content and empty/init User wavetable and wave slots.
We will continue to improve this editor in the future, and have further plans for import/conversion of single-cycle waves from other sources and possibly conversion or import of wavetables from other popular wavetable synthesizers, but for now please explore and report any actual DUPLICATABLE bugs in the 🐞┃xenia-bug-reports channel with the requested detail.
Thanks, and enjoy!
The Usual Suspects/DSP56300 Team
