About bZone

What is bZone

Some history. Shortly after I bought my A3000, long long time ago, I was sick of turning knobs and pushing buttons, especially when renaming samples and decided to try to write a little utility to do sample renaming from PC. I soon found out that things weren't as obvious as they seemed and it took me quite some time to get sample renaming working. In the meantime, the utility grow to be a complete editor. That's when bZone (before it was called "BlueZone") was born.

What It is now a MS Windows based editor for the Yamaha A-series samplers (A3000, A4000, A5000). It offers editing of almost all parameters inside the memory of the Ax000, thus parameters of loaded objects. Apart from having a user friendly interface (knobs, graphs,...), it contains a number of tools that can make complex tasks easier. See further on this page for a feature list.

bZone uses MIDI system exclusive messages for editing. This means you must have a bidrectional MIDI connection between PC and Ax000 (both in and out). In a future version, bZone might also support transferring samples over SCSI. For a list of the requirements to run bZone, click here. bZone does not allow managing of external disks. You'll need A3kDisky for that. You might also wish to check out WaveSurgeon/Mobius, a sample looping and editing tool.

The plan was and is to make bZone shareware: there is a demoversion available for free with limited functionality and users who register get access to a number of advanced features. However, from the beginning I thought it was a good idea to make pre releases available so that users could see what I was doing and gimme feedback. Pre-releases are all releases with version numbers lower than 1.00. They all expire after some date. All of this will thus change with the upcoming release of 1.00.

Features

Basic (available to all users)

• Clear overview of all objects loaded an their relationship.
• Audition a sample while editing. With auto-repeat function.
• Easy management of program/sample and bank/sample relations.
• Program/sample renaming with the keyboard.
• Editing of sample parameters with knobs and other fancy controls.
• Full editing of samples, banks, programs and easyedits
• Easy editing of the sample and program controller matrix.
• Full editing of program effects and their parameters.
• Execute commands like Duplicate, Delete, Create Bank
• Lots of customizable options
• Thumbnails on graphs (keymap, filter, AEG) so you can drag keymappings, filter cutoffs,...
• Copy and paste sample or programs parameters.
• Export/import sample and programs params to/from a file.

Advanced features (only for registered users)

• Turn off that splash screen ;-)
• Multiple selection of samples and/or programs.

Maybe some day...

• Automapper. Have bZone map a number of sample over a range.
• The bZone help file or manual.
• Execute commands like loop remix, loop divide, normalize.
• SMDI. Transfer (wav) files between PC and Axk.