Understanding and editing the .organ files

[Dorsetmike]

Attached is an attempt to provide a bit of guidance to the .organ definition files, and how to edit them to add different stops, couplers divisionals etc.

It's in Word .doc format, and will open in Word or Open Office writer; I did try a PDF version but it's a bit untidy, doesn't retain the columns properly. It's said we learn by our mistakes, this is partly a result of mistakes I've made, hopefully it will prevent others making the same mistakes. Often when a file doesn't load the error messages can be somewhat cryptic, this may give sone pointers to problem areas. I submitted it to Graham and Lars P for comments and have incorporated their feedback.

This will always be a work in progress as software updates arrive and as we discover more problems or find shortcuts.

If you have further tips and/or comments it would help if you could quote page number and section (Manuals, Stops, Divisionals etc)

Editing .organ files can be done in a text editor like notepad or wordpad, but only use "Save" not "Save as", "Save as" usually requires you to choose the file extension from a list and .organ is not on the list!!

One tip I would add, if you intend to do any major modifications like adding stops, couplers etc first make a copy of the original file and rename it with the same name plus a suffix, like Stjoes1, or stmaggies test then work on your renamed file, that way you can always go back to the original to play or to cross reference entries.

[Dorsetmike]

One thing that prompted me to do this was when I decided to make a simple small organ that I could use to test pipe combinations, and experiment with MIDI control and similar tasks without having a massive file to load each time I needed some different options taking ages and using lots of memory.

I find I like certain stops from different sample sets but trying to compare the sounds of 2 similar ranks by double clicking on individual notes gets a bit time consuming and also doesn't give any idea how they blend when played with other stops hence my "testbed" organs. I am building a few basic definition files for 2 manual & pedal and about 12 -16 ranks and will play short pieces through them. The basic testbed definition files will contain all the entries that wil be common to each of the testbeds, (differences will be things like number of notes on a keyboard,) I can then copy/paste complete Stop entries from a .organ file to a suitable testbed file and the relevant stop files folder to that testbed's directory.

That's the intention anyway, I'll let you know what happens!

[Dorsetmike]

Testbed works!, a few minor errors on loading, bracket missed, an s had got deleted, a couple out of range. Also while doing a find/replace to change Red to Dark Red (label on some stops) not having selected "maintain case" it decided to change "Storedivisional" to Sto Dark Redivisional.

Anyway it works --- and plays too!