Someone reported a problem that I’ve never encountered before: they can’t get Synth1 to receive patches from Synth1 Librarian.
Synth1 Librarian sends patches to Synth1 via a temporary patch folder, which is located at %APPDATA%\Synth1.Librarian.64|32.net\TempPatches (the 64/32 depends on the bitness of the Librarian). So the requirements to send patches are:
- Synth1 Librarian needs to point to the correct Synth1 DLL
- Synth1 Librarian needs to know Synth1’s INI file location
- Synth1 needs to point SoundBank00 to the temporary patch folder
- Synth1 needs “Select program from host” enabled
Synth1 Librarian should automate steps (2) to (4), but in some cases file permissions might prevent it from doing so. To get around that issue, try running your DAW/host as Administrator.
When everything is configured correctly, the options in Synth1 Librarian and Synth1 should look like this (note the highlighted areas). Whenever you select a Patch in the Librarian, you should see Synth1’s UI update:
If you continue having problems, please report them using the comments, and I’ll do my best to fix them for a future release.
UPDATE August 4th 2018
If your Windows user name contains UNICODE characters (e.g accents or umlauts), double-check the SoundBank00 path in Synth1’s settings. If the path contains strange characters, use the Browse button point it at the correct path (e.g. C:\Users\Zoé\AppData\Roaming\Synt1.Librarian.64.net\TempPatches)
25 comments to “HELP! Why isn’t Synth1 Librarian sending patches to Synth1?”
Pedro Otero - April 13, 2018
Hello,
This sounds like a Super tool…
I am getting this error “4/13/2018 10:31 AM – Access to the path ‘C:\Users\Pedro\AppData\Roaming\Daichi\Synth1\Synth1.ini’ is denied.”
How do I make that not denied. I am running with admin privileges and the folder where Synth1 is has admin options on.
neutrino.sky - April 15, 2018
First we need to establish if Synth1 Librarian is the problem, or if there’s a bigger issue. Try this:
1) Load up Synth1 VST in your DAW (not via the Librarian)
2) Click opt, and change the ExtBank folder to a temporary location (e.g. C:\)
3) Click OK
4) Close down your DAW completely, so that Synth1 VST is unloaded from memory
5) Now restart your DAW, and reload Synth1 VST
6) Click opt, and check the the ExtBank folder
If the value isn’t C:\, you’ve got some kind of Windows issue. Does your Windows user name contain accented characters? If so, that could cause problems.
Also, check the file properties for Synth1.ini, and ensure that read-only isn’t checked!
Pedro Otero - April 19, 2018
What if it says “one or more errors ocurred”? Is there an error log??
neutrino.sky - April 19, 2018
The message area is the only log in this version (the upcoming release has better logging capabilities). Does this error happen at startup, or later on? Reply with your messages, then I can see the timeline of activities.
Pedro Otero - April 19, 2018
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – Loaded.
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – Found 0 patches.
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – Building library…
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – Unzipping patch archives…
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – Importing banks…
4/19/2018 12:13 PM – One or more errors occurred.
Apparently after importing banks. What subdirectory is that??
neutrino.sky - April 19, 2018
So the problem is in the import process. The Librarian creates a temp folder (under %TMP%).
Here’s an idea: reduce your zipbank contents down to, say, 5 zips (ie move the other zips elsewhere temporarily). Check the contents of those zip files – they should have numbered files like 001.sy1 etc). Try running the import against this small set, and see if it works. If it does, try adding more zips until you find the offending one.
Pedro Otero - April 19, 2018
Yes, it worked. A big hint is to look at the size of the zip file. Some of them come with PDF files or mp3 files…
Got it to work
neutrino.sky - April 19, 2018
Glad you got it working 🙂
The upcoming release has a more robust import process, so hopefully this won’t continue to be a problem.
will - June 6, 2018
06/06/2018 22:09 – This instance is currently hosting the Librarian database.
06/06/2018 22:09 – Loaded.
06/06/2018 22:09 – Found 0 patches.
06/06/2018 22:10 – Building library…
06/06/2018 22:10 – Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: MaxDegreeOfParallelism
06/06/2018 22:10 – Building library…
06/06/2018 22:10 – Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: MaxDegreeOfParallelism
06/06/2018 22:10 – Rebuilding matches for all Categories…
06/06/2018 22:10 – Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: MaxDegreeOfParallelism
hi i am getting these messages when i try to build a libary
neutrino.sky - June 7, 2018
It looks like you’re running on a single core machine? If so, that’s an oversight on my part (I didn’t think anyone was using less than 2 cores these days).
I’ll fix that in an upcoming release. Do you have another machine you could try it on?
will - June 7, 2018
my laptop is a emachines i think 12 yrs old and it is running windows 7 and no i dont have another pc when is release due out
neutrino.sky - June 18, 2018
I’ve created a new release that should work with single core machines (see the Downloads page).
Be warned: building the library may take a very long time on your machine. Make sure you’ve got around 150MB disk space free. I would also suggest building with a lightweight VST host instead of your DAW (something like SAVIHost), to help with memory usage. Good luck!
Otnip - August 1, 2018
hey! I haven’t managed to get librarian to work, and i suspect it’s because of my Windows user name containing accented characters as you said above (it has an “á”). Is there any workaround? This plugin seems to be so useful
neutrino.sky - August 1, 2018
Hi. Have you tried running your DAW/host as Administrator? If that doesn’t work, the only workaround I can think of: create a new user account, with plain ASCII characters.
If I can find an easy fix for this, I’ll try to get a new release out later this month.
byTE - September 20, 2018
hi neutrino.sky,
in another project, i’ve also edited synth1.ini programatically and had a similar problem.
A friend just reproduced it with your software.
Seems like the file is read in “Encoding.Unicode” by synth1,
since i write the file in “Encoding.Unicode”, the problem has disappeared.
# File.WriteAllText(config, str, Encoding.Unicode);
The following file encodings will not work and produce broken characters:
– UTF8
– UTF7
– UTF32
– BigEndianUnicode
– ASCII
hope this helps you debug,
..byTE
neutrino.sky - September 21, 2018
Hi, thanks for this info! I didn’t have time to trace through the encodings myself, so I really appreciate your effort.
I’ll add this fix in the next release 🙂
Andrey - April 11, 2020
Hi! Librarian can’t find patches and get this message:
11.04.2020 10:04 – This instance is currently hosting the Librarian database.
11.04.2020 10:04 – Loaded.
11.04.2020 10:04 – Found 0 patches.
11.04.2020 10:04 – Произошла ошибка при отправке запроса. (in eng: An error occurred while sending the request)
I tried to run my DAW (Reaper) as Administrator.
I’m from Russia and my profile name is “Андрей”. Maybe this is a problem…
Can you help me?
neutrino.sky - April 14, 2020
Hi, it’s difficult to say what the problem is. If you follow the steps at Reporting an error or bug, I’ll see if I can help.
Another Single-core Guy - August 14, 2020
Look, I’m having the same problem of the single-core guy, can you just check if the machine have 1 core and double the max number of parallel functions.
Please release a new update for us. I love this plugin. <3
neutrino.sky - August 25, 2020
Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully I can get a new version out in the next few weeks. 👍
Derek - September 10, 2024
Just a quick one.
I installed it in Cakewalk as it runs anything. Everything was fine. Worked perfectly until I added another bank.
Cakewalk off-loaded Librarian and it never worked again’
Will perservere as it was brilliant, while it worked.
I forgot to mention that the unzipping stalled a couple of times but the plugin continued to work.
Thanks
Derek - September 11, 2024
Update!
Working again.
CakeWalk removed the plugin directory from the list. I had to re-link them in preferences.
As someone else pointed out I removed the plethora of text, pdf and image files in the banks.
The result was amazing with everything ‘going like a Boeing’
Thank you again
neutrino.sky - September 16, 2024
Glad you got it working!
Derek - September 14, 2024
While I’m here.
What capacity does Librarian have as I have access to !000’s of patches.
How does it manage to catagorise patches with basically stupid or corny names.
I wonder if the patch installation program is actually finding half of the patches I have loaded into /zipbank.
Still functioning perfectly otherwise.
Thanks
neutrino.sky - September 16, 2024
1) In theory the capacity can be millions of patches. In practice it would be very slow to use.
2) The categorisation algorithm is the ‘magic sauce’: the Librarian uses statistics + heuristics to categorise. It’s reasonably good, but not perfect.
3) The Librarian tries to identify and discard duplicates. So if Patch1 and Patch2 have different names, but have the same values, the second patch will be ignored.