Volcako

Note: this project has not been tested with Volca FM 2 (released 2022)! Get in touch if you have one!

This is a realtime editor for the Korg Volca FM. It exposes all of Volca's parameters in one ugly functional screen. In addition it can load and save entire 32 voice banks in .SYX format. If you have a midi input device connected, the keypresses will be routed to Volca, optionally with note velocity!

How to use:

• Select your midi out device from Settings. The Volca listens to the sysex messages regardless of the channel it's set to.
• Selecting a patch or editing the patch parameters sends it to the currently selected slot on the Volca. You still have to Save the patch manually on the device (Edit->Write, hardware limitation)
• File->Load .SYX can be used to load an entire DX7 patch bank.
• File->Send All Patches will send and save all of the 32 patches to the device.

Some nice to know things:

• Right click on an envelope to copy/paste the values
• Control-click on an input field to type in the value
• The last edited present is auto-saved/loaded into lastpreset.txt

Windows release can be found at: https://github.com/Luomu/volcako/releases/download/r1/volcako-r1.zip

Release notes

R2 (May 2022)
[New] Allow copying and pasting patches (right-click patch browser)
[New] Save the entire patch bank on shutdown as lastbank.syx, load on startup
[New] Add Init Patch to the browser right-click menu
[New] EXPERIMENTAL: Add "DX7 compatibility mode" to settings: Sends sysex messages according to the original DX7 spec. Will sound wrong on Volca FM. May work with Volca FM2.
[New] Add "reset envelope" context menu action

R1 (November 2019)
Initial release

Building

Only a Windows build has been made so far. However, all the libraries used are cross platform so a Mac/Linux port should be a breeze. You have two choices: CMake and Genie.

Using CMake is simple with Visual Studio 2022 (Community): Just open the folder and it shoudl run the CMake configuration. Then select Build->Build all.

With genie you need to generate the makefile/solution for the IDE of your choice. To create .sln for VS 2019, run this in the root directory:

genie vs2019

Precompiled Genie Windows executable: https://github.com/bkaradzic/bx/raw/master/tools/bin/windows/genie.exe

Libraries used

dear imgui - https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

glfw - www.glfw.org/

inipp - https://github.com/mcmtroffaes/inipp

rtmidi - www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/rtmidi/

tinyfiledialogs - https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyfiledialogs/

font awesome + headers - https://github.com/juliettef/IconFontCppHeaders/

References

Korg Volca FM Midi implementation - www.korg.com/us/support/download/manual/0/558/2963/

Thanks to

Dexed - https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/ - DX7 VST and editor, used to verify Sysex compatibility