I’m keen to put some code on GitHub that will listen for changes to my instrument patch folders and auto update Unity patches, hoping to hack up a tool to convert folders to guru zip files from them for sharing on this forum

Can you guide me into the open source Unify patch format please so I read and write the parameters for each patch file

Kev

the limiter on/off switch is on the far right of each 3300 patch.

Here is a link to the script:

https://juho-lee.com/archive

Search for the following script and copy it to your autohotkey editor:
UWP API OCR Specific Region or Entire Screen

Edit row 6 of the script to select the region you want to capture (below coordinates to capture TYPE value in Pigments):

hBitmap := HBitmapFromScreen(648, 466, 150, 50)

Now uncomment the Msgbox (row 10) and add the second row below it:

;MsgBox, % text ;find and remove all "`n" from the script to skip adding linebreaks
Clipboard := text

Save this script into the same folder as your Unify Patch Creator script and close it.

In your Unify Patch Creator script, add the following line just after you have the screen showing the page you want to capture:

Run, %A_AHKPath% "%A_ScriptDir%\*NAME OF FILE YOU SAVED FOR DOWNLOADED OCR SCRIPT"

You can now just use the command Send, ^v once you have selected where you want to paste the captured data...

This has been very helpful to me, so hope that it helps those of you looking for an easy OCR solution to creating patches in Windows

I've been working on a new unified library for all the instruments, using AutoHotKey (AHK) to automate the process on Windows. Most of the work has gone very smoothly, yielding over 2100 patches for all except Darwin, Glasgow, Marseille, and Milpitas. I could use some help for these. I have devised some advanced AHK programming techniques to load the patches one by one, but there's no automatic way to get the preset-names. Instead, I'm manually typing all the preset-names (which I read from looking at the plug-in GUI) into a text file, one file per "bank" or "cartridge" of presets. I've attached an example of one I made for Darwin's DRUMS 2 cartridge.

If anyone here (who owns Gadget 2 already) is willing to help create these preset-name files, please comment here. I've started on Darwin, and have already done the first 20 cartridges, but there are 20 more to go (AKIRA through to T1 VOICE). Milpitas also uses the virtual-cartridge system (25 cartridges, 50 presets each), but Glasgow and Marseille do not, so they will only need one file each. As the attached file shows, I've adopted the convention of including both the plugin-name and the cartridge-name (where used) in each text file, so I can tell them apart easily.

I have downloaded them, and my first experiment failed to work. I could run the freestanding version of the Proteus VX, a free sampler and sample libraries, but only in 32-bit format. I could get the freestanding version to run, and the sounds are amazing! Tried to get it working in both ACID Pro 10 Suite, and Cakewalk - not so much. The VST would install, but the GUI would show up as a tiny, useless box on the screen. 

On to my next discovery - while poking through what other samples, samplers, and libraries were there, I noticed that there was an Emulator X listed in my searches! This purported to have both 32- and 64-bit VSTs, so I did a virus scan, installed them (on Win7), and, lo and behold, they show up in Unify! I am just beginning to pick through the monumental number of sample libraries which are there (you have to grab those separately - about a GB maybe). But it's basically everything that was released for the Emulator hardware, then software, then abandonware. 

The Archive.org owner is very careful about vetting what he puts up for download, so when he says that these libraries and samples are "Public Domain Mark 1", I believe that they are. The owner was Creative Technologies, and they may still have some claim to the software and samples, but they show no interest in support, other than providing a few drivers for the hardware Emulators. 

It would be great if someone took this on to "Unify" some or all of the libraries - there is a huge amount of great stuff there, and free!

• Click to download the .guru file
• Click to download the AHK script I used to make it

This is the simplest kind of unified library, containing one Unify patch per F.'em factory patch, with nothing else added (macro definitions, AUX effects layers, etc.). Consider it an example of how we typically start a new unified library. If anyone wants to figure out a nice "fleshed-out" unify patch template, please post the .unify file here (preferably with the F.'em instance on INST1 replaced by Sine Wave Synth, to reduce the file size) and I can make a revised version of the library with your changes applied to all patches.

John and I chose not to make this an "official" unified library for two reasons:

1. F.'em saves a huge amount of data in its state, and as a result, every single unified patch (.unify file) is over 1.9 MB, making the whole Patches folder (566 patch files) just over 1 GB in size.
2. The factory presets don't do a great job of showing off what this very powerful (11 operator!) FM synth can do, and as a result, may not be worth the >1 GB of disk space.

However, it does make a nice teaching example for AHK and library-unification in general, so I decided to post it here.

F.'em has quite a nice preset browser, where you can click on an item in the Category column to select only presets in that category, double-click the first one to load it, and then click the next/prev buttons to scroll through them. I did this when using my AHK script, to unify one category at a time, as follows:

1. Select one Category item, making sure to first de-select any others, so you get only presets in that category.
2. Decide on a suitable prefix for the unified patch names (e.g. "STR - " for strings), and put that into the script at line 31.
3. Manually load the first preset in the category, and then save it manually in Unify, adding the chosen prefix at the beginning of the patch name, and setting other metadata items like Category, Tags, etc. for that category.
4. Run the script to automatically select and save the remaining presets in the list, and press ESC to stop as soon as the last one has been saved.
5. Repeat for the next category.

Some categories contain only one or a few presets, so I did these manually. The F.'em factory preset collection contains a few extra categories which I consider redundant, e.g. "voice" and "voices"; I saved both with prefix "VOX - ". (This is one case where you might want to select both in F.'em's Category list, to get a single list with both sets of presets.)

F.'em takes a few seconds to load (especially the first time), and benefits substantially from instance re-use in Unify. Locate the ReuseAcceptRules.xml file (see the linked manual page for where to find it), open it in a plain-text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac), and add a line near the bottom as shown below (this is my current ReuseAcceptRules.xml file):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<PluginRules>
<PluginRule vendor="Spectrasonics"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Native Instruments%" name="Massive"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Native Instruments%" name="Reaktor"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Rhizomatic" name="Plasmonic"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Decidedly" descName="DecentSampler"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Arturia" descName="Pigments"/>
<PluginRule vendor="KORG" descName="wavestate%"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Cherry Audio"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Hexachords" name="Orb Synth"/>
<PluginRule vendor="Tracktion" name="F-em%"/>
</PluginRules>

The % sign at the end of the name is important, because the actual plug-in name may have something like "(x64)" tacked onto it, depending on your operating system. The % is a wild-card character which will match anything.

NOTE: While working on this, I discovered a bug in Unify's instance reuse code, which means that the above will only work on Windows at the moment, but Mac users can go ahead and add the line to your ReuseAcceptRules.xml file anyway, because I'll include a fix for this in the next release of Unify (including the next release of the current v1.8.x public beta).