FreakSwap: try new engines on your MicroFreak
Hey!
I always thought it shouldn’t be impossible to add new audio engines to the Arturia MicroFreak, especially since several of the stock ones originally came from Mutable Instruments. So this week I spent some time digging into it and ended up building this tool:
https://doriamxyz.github.io/FreakSwap/
What it does is replace one of the MicroFreak’s stock audio engines with another one adapted from Mutable Instruments Plaits.
There are quite a few Plaits models that never made it into the MicroFreak. Some are somewhat similar to engines that are already there, while others behave pretty differently.
The workflow is pretty simple:
- Pick a new engine.
- Choose which original engine to replace from the available options.
- Download the modified .mff file and installation instructions.
Everything runs locally in your browser. There’s no account, no app to install, and your firmware file isn’t uploaded anywhere.
The website also doesn’t connect to or flash the MicroFreak directly. You install the modified firmware manually afterwards using Arturia’s MIDI Control Center.
For now, the number of stock engines that can be replaced is still limited, and this first version supports one replacement at a time, so you can’t necessarily remove the engine you use the least. I preferred to prioritize having as many new engines as possible available to try.
Ideally, I’d like to be able to add engines instead of replacing existing ones, but I still haven’t found a way to make that work properly. Maybe later? Maybe Arturia sees this and eventually gives us an SDK so we can do it the right way?
It probably goes without saying, but this is completely unofficial, and modifying/flashing firmware always comes with some risk. Back up your presets first, and of course, use it at your own risk.