The Usual Suspects

Digitally Preserving Classic Synthesizers through Emulation

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Patch Manager

The Patch Manager is the central hub for organizing, browsing, and managing presets across all Gearmulator emulations. It replaces the earlier Preset Browser with a modern database-driven approach — instead of navigating banks and files on disk, you work with categories, tags, and favourites to find and organize your sounds.

The Patch Manager is part of the plugin itself and can be accessed by clicking Presets (Osirus), Patches (Vavra), or Browser (OsTIrus, Xenia, NodalRed2x, JE-8086) depending on which emulator you are using.

Supported File Formats

The Patch Manager can import presets from a wide range of file formats:

All Emulations:

Osirus / OsTIrus (Access Virus):

Vavra / Xenia (Waldorf):

NodalRed2x (Nord Lead):

JE-8086 (Roland JP-8000):

Data Sources

Patches are provided by various Data Sources. Where applicable, ROM/factory presets are automatically added (not for Waldorf or Nord synths due to the way they work in the hardware). Additional patches from disk can be added via right-click on the Data Sources node — select a file or even a whole folder to add it to the database. Folders are scanned recursively, so you can point it at your entire preset collection.

It is highly recommended to keep your patches and banks located on disk separately from your plugin and config folder locations to avoid operating system permissions issues and to prevent slowness of startup performance.

Categories, Tags & Favourites

In the database, patches can be organized into Categories, Tags, and Favourites. Some manufacturers include category information in their patch format — you can modify these or create your own by right-clicking on the appropriate heading and selecting Add.

Key features:

Additionally, each emulation may define its own custom tag types. For example, Osirus provides Virus Model and Virus Features tags to help narrow down patches by hardware generation or synthesis features used.

Searching & Filtering

The Patch Manager provides several ways to find patches:

Searches run in the background, so the UI stays responsive even with large databases.

Patch List

The patch list supports two layout modes, selectable via the right-click context menu:

Context menu options (right-click on patches):

User Banks

User Banks allow you to save and organize your custom patches. Create a User Bank by right-clicking on User and selecting Create, then add patches by dragging them from the patch list into the User Bank.

To export a User Bank for use with hardware, right-click to show the context menu and choose your export format (.syx or .mid).

If you intend to export a User Bank to the actual hardware synth, consider limiting the number of patches to fit within the hardware bank size (typically 128). Patches beyond the hardware limit will be ignored when importing.

Additional User Bank features:

Patch Navigation

MIDI Bank Assignment

The MIDI Bank Assignment feature allows you to assign MIDI bank numbers to data sources in the Patch Manager. Once assigned, you can select patches from that data source by sending standard MIDI Bank Select + Program Change messages — enabling hardware controllers, DAW automation, or external MIDI sequencers to recall any patch in your library without touching the plugin UI.

How It Works

Each data source in the Patch Manager can be assigned a unique MIDI bank number (0–16383). When the plugin receives a MIDI Bank Select message (CC #0 / CC #32) followed by a Program Change, it checks whether a data source is assigned to that bank number. If a match is found, the corresponding patch is loaded automatically from that data source.

If no data source is assigned to the received bank number, the message is passed through to the emulated device as usual.

Assigning a MIDI Bank

  1. In the Patch Manager tree, right-click on the data source you want to assign
  2. Select “Assign MIDI Bank…“ from the context menu
  3. Enter a bank number (0–16383) in the text field that appears
  4. Press Enter to confirm

The data source now displays its bank assignment as a suffix, for example: “Factory Patches [Bank 5]”

Each bank number can only be assigned to one data source at a time. If you enter a number that is already in use, the assignment will not be applied.

Changing or Clearing an Assignment

To change a bank assignment, right-click the data source and select “Change MIDI Bank (Bank N)…“, then enter the new number.

To remove a bank assignment, right-click and select “Clear MIDI Bank (Bank N)”.

MIDI Banks Group

All data sources with assigned bank numbers appear in a dedicated MIDI Banks group in the Patch Manager tree, sorted by bank number. This gives you a quick overview of your current bank layout without having to navigate through the full data source tree.

MIDI Message Format

Bank selection uses the standard MIDI Bank Select mechanism:

Message CC Purpose
Bank Select MSB CC #0 Upper 7 bits of bank number
Bank Select LSB CC #32 Lower 7 bits of bank number
Program Change — Selects the patch within the bank

The bank number is calculated as (MSB × 128) + LSB. For example, to select Bank 5, send CC #0 = 0 and CC #32 = 5, then send a Program Change for the desired patch number.

Example Setup

A typical setup might look like this:

Bank Number Data Source
0 Factory Patches
1 User Creations
2 Rob Papen Soundset
3 Templates

Sending Bank Select 2 → Program Change 15 would load the 16th patch from the “Rob Papen Soundset” data source.

Technical Information

Storage Format

The database keeps track of which data sources have been added, stored at:

(Windows) C:\Users\[username]\Documents\The Usual Suspects\[synthname]\patchmanager\patchmanagerdb.json
(macOS) ~/Documents/The Usual Suspects/[synthname]/patchmanager/patchmanagerdb.json

A binary cache (patchmanagerdb.cache) is maintained alongside the JSON for fast loading.

User banks are stored in the same folder in sysex format:

(Windows) C:\Users\[username]\Documents\The Usual Suspects\[synthname]\patchmanager\MyUserBank.syx
(macOS) ~/Documents/The Usual Suspects/[synthname]/patchmanager/MyUserBank.syx

Patch Modifications

Modifications to patches are stored as deltas next to the imported file. For example, if you imported:

Rob Papen Signature Soundset.MID

There will be a companion file:

Rob Papen Signature Soundset.MID.json

These JSON files store only the differences — added or removed tags compared to the source. Example:

{
  "patches": {
    "prog|0|hash|e1356f571f1194f5b3e3744321fca010": {
      "tags": {
        "category": {
          "removed": ["Favourite 3"]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

In this case, the category “Favourite 3” has been removed from the first patch of that bank.

Patch Identification

Each patch is identified by an MD5 hash of its data. This allows the Patch Manager to detect duplicates and track patches across data sources even when files are moved or renamed.

Backup Strategy