ex.factory 6.10

[Derek]

Hello all.

I'm pleased to announce the next release of ex.factory, which is V6.10.

The main significance of this release is that I have done a lot of work in the background over the past few months to migrate all of my librarians from Java 8 to Java 11, which is quite a significant change as there were quite a lot of "under the hood" changes between Java 8 and Java 9, which meant that quite a lot of program updates were required to run on Java 9 and above.

I actually started looking at this migration about 18 months ago, but I have been held back from moving to later versions of Java because of a really stupid bug in Java 9 on Windows platforms that corrupted the MIDI port names (in particular for multi port devices) that stopped you from selecting MIDI Ports! Which is pretty fundamental for a synth librarian! it was fine on OS X.

This fundamental bug is thankfully now fixed in Java 10 and above, which has allowed me to move forwards at long last.

If you are running earlier versions of ex.factory and you are happy with everything, there is no compelling need to migrate, but there are a few new features.

• All librarians now support MIDI data logging (to assist me in any remote problem diagnosis).
• All librarians now have a new convenience feature where double clicking a Voice in an open file or the library will send the Voice to a synth's edit buffer. A triple click will also open the MIDI router after sending the Voice to the synth.

These are features that have been in sy.factory for a little while, which I have now rolled out to all librarians.

You can download this new version from the the x.factory Librarians web site.

If you decide to go with this new version, you will of course need to update your Java Runtime to Version 11.

The last releases of the librarians that are compatible with Java 8 are also available if you need them on the Archived Products Page.

This release has cleared the decks to allow me to focus on writing a new librarian for the Yamaha Montage!

[jima]

Thanks for all the hard work - someone has been a very busy boy!

[Derek]

Yeah, it was quite a task to get from Java 8 to Java 9 and above as Oracle made some fundamental changes to the innards of Java which made many features relied upon for a long time unavailable, which then affected how the apps work on OS X to look more like native OS X apps. So that required a big change. But then it stalled due to a fundamental bug in Windoze Java that screwed up MIDI device names. Had to waiton that one being fixed,,,,,, Then there are 9 librarians to test with their respective synths on OS X and PC, so a fair bit of work.

All done now, and I am now beavering away on a laptop in the garden after work and before it gets too cold once the sun sets to decode the Montage file format! Making good headway on that, and have an Alpha version of the program opening and displaying file content....