New Sound through old speakers
The main reason buying it was, that the Rogers 5xx feature a Midi Interface and do have an Aux-in. So, you can replace the outdated tone generator with a contemporary software sampler.
If you go for the high budget variant, simply buy Hauptwerk and you are done. I tried the Basic demo and the integration of the organ works perfectly out of the box.
Using GrandOrgue you have to to invest far more time, but far less money. If you are new to the subject, please go here for more info and how to get this great piece of software. There are quite a some free sample sets available in the net, most outstanding those from Piotr Grabowski and his collection of very well sounding instruments.
The target for me was now to integrate the entire organ front-end (pedal, manuals, stops, volume control, crescendo ..) into the UI of Grandorgue.
Step one was to disconnect the manuals and pedal form the internal tone generator. The most easy way to do this, is to switch on "local-off" in the organ's midi settings. The organ will keep sending to midi-out, but not to the internal sound system.
Both manuals, pedalboard, swell pedal and volume control (Great, Pedal) send Note on/off and CC on their respective channels (12, 13, 14). Those can be adjusted, if needed. The "Detect Complex Midi Setup" function in GrandOrgue recognizes the input and configures it automatically.
Managing stops, things are more difficult. Roland/Rodgers uses Sysex messages to transmit a bitmap that contains the holistic on/off information of all stops at once. The advantage is that you can transmit an entire registration with only one message, rather than to send individual program changes or on/off messages. The disadvantage is that you need to find a method to read and decode the bitmap.
In the current release of GrandOrgue (3.1.0) there is no native support for Rodgers Sysex. My first idea was to built a converter similar to MidiPipe, but asking the question in the GrandOrgue forum I got a patch that supposed to add the functionality to GrandOrgue itself. The patch I got did not quite work, but looking at a posting from Keith Packard back in May 2018, that version worked quite well.
There is no ready built version available today (July 2018), but you have to apply the patch to the sources and manage a build for your system. My Unix skills are 25+ years old, but after investing three days into it, I got it working for OSX with the help of Xcode and Homebrew. Wow, things are much easier since the 90s ...
The reward of the efforts is, that you can auto discover the stops now and that the whole mechanism of creating registrations and access them via the pistons works natively, just as it would do with the internal stops of the instrument. This also applies for the crescendo pedal that sends a new registration each time you change the dynamic from ppp to fff.
A further enhancement would be also to be able to transmit registrations back to the organ, at least to manage the stop lights. That would require GrandOrgue to be aware of the entire registration and build the bitmap accordingly each time a stop or coupler changes.
So, that bit is done for now. Next time we look after the lights ...
The main reason buying it was, that the Rogers 5xx feature a Midi Interface and do have an Aux-in. So, you can replace the outdated tone generator with a contemporary software sampler.
If you go for the high budget variant, simply buy Hauptwerk and you are done. I tried the Basic demo and the integration of the organ works perfectly out of the box.Using GrandOrgue you have to to invest far more time, but far less money. If you are new to the subject, please go here for more info and how to get this great piece of software. There are quite a some free sample sets available in the net, most outstanding those from Piotr Grabowski and his collection of very well sounding instruments.
The target for me was now to integrate the entire organ front-end (pedal, manuals, stops, volume control, crescendo ..) into the UI of Grandorgue.
Step one was to disconnect the manuals and pedal form the internal tone generator. The most easy way to do this, is to switch on "local-off" in the organ's midi settings. The organ will keep sending to midi-out, but not to the internal sound system.
Both manuals, pedalboard, swell pedal and volume control (Great, Pedal) send Note on/off and CC on their respective channels (12, 13, 14). Those can be adjusted, if needed. The "Detect Complex Midi Setup" function in GrandOrgue recognizes the input and configures it automatically.
Managing stops, things are more difficult. Roland/Rodgers uses Sysex messages to transmit a bitmap that contains the holistic on/off information of all stops at once. The advantage is that you can transmit an entire registration with only one message, rather than to send individual program changes or on/off messages. The disadvantage is that you need to find a method to read and decode the bitmap.
In the current release of GrandOrgue (3.1.0) there is no native support for Rodgers Sysex. My first idea was to built a converter similar to MidiPipe, but asking the question in the GrandOrgue forum I got a patch that supposed to add the functionality to GrandOrgue itself. The patch I got did not quite work, but looking at a posting from Keith Packard back in May 2018, that version worked quite well.
There is no ready built version available today (July 2018), but you have to apply the patch to the sources and manage a build for your system. My Unix skills are 25+ years old, but after investing three days into it, I got it working for OSX with the help of Xcode and Homebrew. Wow, things are much easier since the 90s ...
The reward of the efforts is, that you can auto discover the stops now and that the whole mechanism of creating registrations and access them via the pistons works natively, just as it would do with the internal stops of the instrument. This also applies for the crescendo pedal that sends a new registration each time you change the dynamic from ppp to fff.
A further enhancement would be also to be able to transmit registrations back to the organ, at least to manage the stop lights. That would require GrandOrgue to be aware of the entire registration and build the bitmap accordingly each time a stop or coupler changes.
So, that bit is done for now. Next time we look after the lights ...
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