Producer Sam Greene was so in love with Aalto, the semi-modular, Mac and Windows soft synth whose developer we profiled last month, that he made his own place to share patches for it. Patches are free to download and use in your music, and you can upload your own; the only restriction is that the site asks that no one re-sell the patches themselves. Find the results:
patchdump.com
You can thank the synth for making it easy. While discussion of sharing features often turns to sophisticated cloud and social features, here’s one solution: just make exchanging files dead-simple. As the patchdump.com site puts it:
Sharing patches for the Aalto synth is easy. It’s just an XML file – a simple text file that the synth uses to make settings and configure all the patch cords. You can copy your presets right from Aalto by using the menu command: “Copy to Clipboard”. All you need beside that is an audio sample of your patch.
Viva XML. (That’s the same thought I had recently when I solved some batch processing of sessions in Ardour, a DAW which uses a simple, understandable XML format.)
In fact, Sam notes he was interested in sharing other instruments, too, but file format complexities made that difficult. That leads to a question: have you got a favorite synth that uses simple, text-based file formats?