Modulate This! - Electronic & Experimental Music Tech, Technique, & People

Sharing Patches and A/B Audio Comparison Between Green Oaks Crystal Desktop Synthesizer on Windows and Crystal XT for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch

I’ve gotten patch sharing working reliably between the windows and mobile version of Green Oak’s Crystal synthesizer.

Patch Sharing Step-by-Step:
These instructions are in an edit of the original instructions at the bottom of this page. Green Oak’s instructions are accurate but assume you know your way around iTunes and Crystal so there are some gotchas.  I’ve added some more detailed notes and steps (in red) to help fill in the gaps. Even if you only want to transfer patches from desktop to mobile, I recommend you go through steps 1-3 anyway so you’ll have a bank with the proper name an in the proper format.

1. Exit Crystal XT, connect your iPad or iPhone to iTunes, choose your device in iTunes, and select the "Apps" tab.
   Exiting the app on the mobile device is crucial. I forgot to do this a few times. Transfer won’t work if the app is running.
2. In the File Sharing section of the iTunes window, select CrystalSynthXT. The documents section should show a file named CrystalPatches.fxb.
   It took me a minute to find this in iTunes so I’ve added this screen shot so show you how to navigate (click to enlarge). At first I could not find the apps as they are below the fold and you have to scroll down.
   
   

Using Green Oak Crystal Synthesizer with Percussa AudioCubes

Experiments with Green Oak’s desktop version of Crystal continue. It’s been a while since I’ve used this synth as I’ve been focusing most of my energy on using commercial synths. It’s a pretty amazing synth and competes feature wise against many commercial synths.

Here is a cool feature. The MIDI Modulate matrix supports direct mapping of MIDI CC’s. This means you can map controllers directly without having to do it through your DAW. Click the image below to see a close-up of the screen shot which illustrates how I’ve used Percussa’s free MIDI Bridge app to configure AudioCubes to send CCs, and then I configure Crystal to listen for spatial control from cube faces.

Mark Mosher
Electronic Music Artist, Boulder CO
www.modulatethis.com

Experimenting with Patch Sharing with Crystal VST Desktop and iPhone/IPad

I was quite excited to see that Crystal XT was released for iPhone/iPad, mainly because the mobile version shares synth architecture allowing you to program patches on the desktop then move patches to the mobile edition. I think this is the sort of workflow that is going to make me use the iPhone more for music making.

This is just a quick post to let you now I’ve had success with this this. There on instructions on this at the bottom of this page - http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/. It took me a while get this all worked out as I was not that familiar with Crystal’s patch management system when using it within Live.

I’ve got it all worked out now and will do a follow up post with more step-by-step details soon.

Mark Mosher
Electronic Music Artist, Boulder CO
www.modulatethis.com