M-Audio Venom

Single Patch Editor

Communicating with Edisyn
Set Edisyn's MIDI channel to the same as your Venom.

Warning
The Venom's USB MIDI device can and does occasionally hang permanently until you power cycle the machine. You may still see the device in Edisyn but nothing will happen when Edisyn tries to send stuff to it.

Patches
Vyzex saves patches to disk using an unnecessarily proprietary and stupid format. I have taken the liberty of converting some publicly available patches to standard sysex files, which Edisyn can read. Look for resources/VenomPatches.zip in Edisyn's Distribution.

Hints

Gotchas

Note to Vyzex Users
Edisyn is a general-purpose patch editor tool and so its approach is designed to accommodate a wide range of synthesizers. Vyzex is designed for a single synthesizer, and so it is highly customized for that purpose in ways Edisyn cannot be. You may have noticed that Edisyn's Venom editor launches immediately, while Vyzex spends a long time loading every single patch from your Venom. This is because Vyzex stays in sync with your Venom, while Edisyn does not. As a result, Vyzex can do several things Edisyn cannot. For example, Vyzex tells you exactly which multi-patches depend on the single patch you're overwriting, and can display all the patches at once. Also, because it knows about all your patches together, Vyzex can dive down into single patches or arpeggio headers to allow you to change portions them from a multi-patch. This is a confusing and very bad idea, so it's good Edisyn can't do that. Edisyn can load the single patches or arpeggios associated with a multi-patch so you can edit them separately.

So why use Edisyn instead of Vyzex? Partly because Vyzex will very soon be obsoleted and impossible to run. And besides fixing some bad Vyzex errors, Edisyn can do one major thing Vyzex (and M-Audio's installed software) cannot: directly edit arpeggios.

Interesting Facts
The Venom's waveforms come from certain sources as indicated by initials at the beginning of them. Here are the ones I know of:



Librarian Support

The Venom has very, very slow sysex. This will manifest itself in very slow librarian uploads and downloads. I would suggest downloading the entire machine, then saving it to a file and mostly uploading from there.

Thanks

Thanks to Jan Bote (jan.bote@gmx.de) for his assistance and knowledge.

By    Sean Luke
Date    November 25, 2020