FM2MIDI HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT
I’ve been keyboard and synthesizer player since the mid-80’s and have worked with many hardware synthesizers from manufactures like Akai, Alesis, Ensoniq, Kawai, Korg, Novation, Roland, Waldorf, and Yamaha.
Many instruments provide knobs and sliders for editing patches but many have only a small LCD display. I soon discovered what I needed was a universal editor-librarian. Editor-librarian software connects to your MIDI device and allows you to edit the internal programs from your computer screen. Most editor-librarians support a wide-range of models from many manufactures.
One of my favorite universal editor-librarians was called SoundDiver by Emagic, Inc. SoundDiver had modules for each synth model, and would even allow you to construct new modules for synths that were not already supported. In 2002 when Emagic was bought by Apple, Inc., SoundDiver was discontinued.
There was a final release of SoundDiver for Mac OS X but it stopped working when Mac OS X 10.7 was released dropping support for PowerPC applications.
There are other universal editor-librarians available, most notably MIDI Quest by Sound Quest and Unisyn by MOTU. There are also other editor-librarians, specific to a particular instrument. I still can’t find a single program flexible enough to work with all my outboard gear.
This got me thinking about what was essential for an editor-librarian. What was needed was a robust database with a easy to customize interface that could receive and transmit MIDI data.
Even if it didn’t work as a DAW plugin this would be enough to store, retrieve, organize, and manipulate the programs for any MIDI device that could communicate these values with a computer.
Having been a FileMaker Developer for years, I knew it’s database engine and easy-to-use development tools would make it a great candidate as a platform for a new editor-librarian. There was only one problem, there was no native support for MIDI.
This is what lead me to develop FM2MIDI, it connects FileMaker to MIDI. FM2MIDI provides the essential functions to send and receive MIDI messages. You can also get information about the MIDI environment and read & write SYX format files.
About the Developer
Duane Weller has been a Keyboard Player & Synthesist since the mid 80's, and a FileMaker developer since 1996. He is a certified FileMaker Pro Developer in versions 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, & 16.