KORG Unveiled The Prologue Synthesizer SDK Development Board

There's a little more info on the SDK (not the hardware) Korg's Prologue SDK page.

The juicy bit:
So no sample players or the like as speculated, but plenty of room for e.g. a little wavetable action.

limited to 6 paramaters. not bad!

just checking my Q has 9, not including overall mods, porta, mixer/ringmod or mod marix.

who is going to buy the kit?
r
maybe rusty ala octa edit fame? prolly 'beneath' his skills?
anyone here going to take the plunge?

Yes–and this makes it even easier.

Then I'll see where the Prologue 8 is at in a few months, unless Korg has something else (similar) up their sleeve for Superbooth.

Waiting for more details:

- dev kit cost
- open vs closed source release of algorithms
- free vs paid release of algorithms
- whether this platform will show up in more Korg products

It looks like the dev kit has an STM32F401, a Cortex-M4 + FPU variant @84MHz. Being an M4 it has the DSP instruction extension. So I guess it's fairly safe to assume that the actual synth also has an STM32F401 per voice.

The dev kit also has an STM32F446ZE, but that is a system controller, not for the synth voice. It'll run the custom FX, I suppose. Hence the external memory device (the FX has 2MB available).

Whilst im not capable to do anything with one, I'm interested
to see what happens with this.

Has any other major manu ever done anything like this before?

We need to drag some of those gaming encoders away from their domains, lol.
Thats where a lot of talent is.

I think I would have liked to see something like this for a cheaper product.
Something like a Volca where you can overwrite the firmware with your own custom one. (call it a Volca Modular or something, with included C libraries with prefab models of oscillators and filters)

I'm a competent C/C++ developer but I think it would still have been fun to see some kind of Nord Modular style building block system especially for people who aren't used to programming.
Though a 3rd party could certainly develop something like that, it would just convert it to the C code ready for the Korg board.

I think the biggest issue though is that it is an INCREDIBLY niche product. It's a big leap to get people to use this. You need to:
Have a Prologue
Have experience with C
Have experience with DSP
Have the motivation to even make anything

if it's like $500 on top of that I could see it being extremely niche.
I would hope that devs are allowed to go commercial with their oscillator models. otherwise I don't think anybody is going to be too motivated to even bother.

So I hope they have more long-term plans for this standard and chipset. Imagine if they made an Electribe or something with user programmable oscillator and filter models and FX.

Axoloti for you , my friend!

this board should be less than 50 USD

I think they made the board so that you DON'T need to own a Prologue.

I hope so, but it doesn't have the filters and stuff does it???

Of course not. It's a development board, so the focus is on the digital oscillator and the effects.

Very much like a CraftSynth.

What's the mission of this board? Is it for those who want to develop but dont own synth? Whould developement without this board but with synthesizer itself be possible? Looks like they itent to make sort of content store at some point (with freeware and payware?) and probably some more products with 3rd party plugins support...

That is my assumption precisely.

^ This. In Eurorack (in a manner similar to the Hoxton Owl).

I would be cool if someone could write some some kind of drum synth with different timbres depending on the key that's pressed.

Or perhaps algorithms that dynamically change the sound based on what keys are pressed. Like as you play it alters a wavetable over time based on what notes you play.

I think it would also be fun to write like a Buchla-style Mod Osc/Complex Osc combo.

Lots of options. That 32KB of RAM is going to be an interesting limitation. Maybe more users will appreciate the limitations of embedded develpment.
Also now users can't blame Korg for poor oscillators or effects.

Keep in mind, as well, that that's _per-voice_, i.e., each voice has its own ARM microcontroller. For point of comparison, the Sequential Prophet 2000 had 256 kW (12-bits per word) total for all eight voices, so eight-bit, lo-fi sample playback (12-to-8 companded or otherwise) is definitely reasonable.

My predictions was pretty accurate. Anyhow the 32k limit is strange since the smallest device have 64k ram and 128k flash, but who knows Bork coders perhaps used the "well known" bloated ST HAL crap. The dev board and tools (assume well known open source) have to utterly cheap else folks could probably just ride with Nucleo and/or Disco.

However as i suggested in Prologue thread hack it and make a ballsier Dialouge instead with 2 LFO's and parameter sequencer, the sram/flash memory is there folks.

no 5 pin midi again like the modal craft stuff. if ive got to plug in a pc or ipad to make a digital sound, why not just use the pc/ipad to do it? unless there has been a sudden glut of midi controllers with usb hosting ive missed

There's no MIDI since this is a dev kit for oscillator and FX code, not an end user product and not a complete synth.

Re. 32kB available; the MCU already has to run envelopes, LFO and other voice control functions, probably including a loader for the custom oscillator code. So a chunk of the 64kB on the chip is taken, and some kind of fixed program environment must be established for the custom code, so 32kB it is.

Ugh!

Unpacking etc and loading is done from master MCU protocoll between master voice card can be utterly simple , the load of doing LFO EG per voice is utterly light and these sits in flash and there is not many parameter variables either not much modulation either who sits in sram. So no 32k is oddly little (flash), perhaps they run a tiny RT kernel, that eats space and speed. Perhaps the master MCU holds all 16 slots and at voice card requests sends over code and then run from voice MCU sram, that would tell why only 32k?

I think this is the case, since the 32K limit is for combined code and variables. Variables would not reside in Flash, obviously, since they can't vary too well there. One reason they may run all user oscillators out of SRAM is so they don't need to do any address relocation or memory mapping based on which slot the oscillator (or effect) is loaded into. In the case of oscillators, it might also mean they can store the code once centrally rather than having 512K of extra Flash on each voice MPU to store the oscillators.

While I would guess the 32K limit mostly stems from the RAM size of the voice MCUs, there may also be some consideration of the time it would take to transfer a larger chunk of data out to the voices when a patch is changed (assuming the user oscillator code is not stored redundantly for each voice card). A few megabytes of sample data might cause an unacceptably long delay.

Briefly scoped this earlier. Seems like you would require a prologue?

"Via this SDK custom digital oscillators can be created for the MULTI ENGINE, and custom modulation effects can be added to the existing modulation effects. Users can then load these new custom oscillators and modulation effects into their prologue via the prologue Librarian application (Mac and Win)."

I might nab one for the right price / for a laugh?

But I am a bit too busy working on my own hardware, and don't own a prologue so probabaly not for me if I'm being pragmatic.

Flattered. But

Interesting.. I didn't think there would be hardware associated with the SDK. Presumably this lets you work on oscillators/fx without a Prologue.

It depends on how what you've done is previewed with this board.. but if it's the right price I might pick one up before getting the full synth. A large amount of the appeal of the Prologue 16 to me is how deep this stuff can go.

Another pic from insta. "SDK dev boards all packed. Limited edition for superbooth."

Hopefully that just means they've printed something SuperBooth related on the PCBs and doesn't mean they're planning to shoot themselves in the foot by only selling a few total at SuperBooth randomly.

Korg trying their own hand at MoogFest-style marketing tactics?

Interesting.