Main Menu
On top of the browser control interface is the main menu bar.
The menu buttons allow you to load and save synthesizer patches and to configure SynthPi. The “MIDI Learn Mode” button is described on the page “SynthPi with MIDI“.
Load Patch
The leftmost menu button displays the name of the actual patch. Clicking it opens the “Load Patch” panel.
The panel is devided in two sections: “Your Patches” and “Factory Presets” – and they mean excactly what their name implies.
The patches are ordered by patch type (e.g. BASS, POLY, PAD, LEAD) and patch name. The patch types have different background colors.
Click a patch name to load that specific patch. The “Load Patch” window doesn’t close automatically after loading a patch. So you can try out several patches until you found what you were looking for.
Click the close button in the top right corner or somewhere outside the panel to close it.
Save Patch
This is the “save” button in the menu bar. Click it and the “Save Patch” panel opens.
Enter a name for your patch and choose a type to categorize it. Clicking the “Save New Patch” button will save it.
If you like to overwrite an existing patch with the one you are saving, still enter a name and type but then press one of the already saved patches from the list below.
To delete an existing patch, click the trash can icon right to the name in the existing patch list.
Click the close button in the top right corner or somewhere outside the panel to close it.
Randomize Patch
This is the magic “Randomize” button in the menu bar.
It creates a new patch with completely randomized parameters. This will result sometimes in new inspiring sounds. Most often, though, it will create strange, ugly, sinister, noisy … patches.
Settings
The “Settings” button in the menu bar will open the “Settings” panel.
“MIDI Channel”
Select the MIDI channel (1-16) SynthPi should use to listen to keyboard and controller MIDI data. You can also assign MIDI CC controllers to various parameters as described in SynthPi with MIDI.- “Polyphony”
Sets how many voices can be played at a time. Some computers cannot handle the default 8 voices. So in some cases you might want to reduce this number. - “Pitch bend range”
Set the number of semitones the MIDI pitch bend wheel will bend a played note. And there’s one strange situation I actually haven’t a clue why this sometimes happens (mostly on Macs): Using MIDI pitch bend sometimes shows weird behaviour like wrong direction or static transposition of all played sounds. When such a strange behavior occurs after you used your MIDI pitch bender, turn on the option “fix strange behavior“.
Interface Color
The brightness button in the main menu allows you to switch the interface color scheme. This might come handy for extremely bright or dark usage environments. Or maybe it’s just a matter of taste.
One last thing: All configuration settings and your saved patches are stored in files on the computer running SynthPi. You can find these files in your user or home directory in the folder “synthpi”. These are more or less human readable JSON files called “settings.json” and “user-patches.json”. The user patches file can be used for back-up or sharing purposes.