Use at your own risk!!!

You may for example:

• Destroy your PC OS by accidentally writing random binary stuff to the middle of a critical file on your computer
• Destroy your Shapeshifter by writing something where you shouldn't have and running that firmware
• I will take absolutely zero responsibility if you use this tool to brick or break your expensive eurorack module.

Only tested with the 2.0.4 jic, and the offsets are calculated for that version only. Previous (or future?) firmware versions will not work, but if you understand what the scripts are doing it's easy to change and apply this to other versions.

What it is

Two scripts,

• one converts a folder containing serum format wavetables/WAVs to a binary blob (along with first 6 characters of their filenames)
• one applies that binary blob to the firmware file. This also handles fixing the .jic file checksum so it works with Quartus Programmer (first time I've heard anyone solve this!). So no need to use the super slow Terasic writer with the raw EPCS dump. Writing this file takes like 1 minute.

It's a relatively fast process for the conversion, firmware editing, and flashing the .jic.

The offsets in the binary file seem to sometimes change between firmware versions, so be sure to set the offsets to match your firmware version binary format.

What it does exactly

• Downsamples Serum format wavetables (.wavs) from 2048 to 512 samples using resample_poly from scipy's signal processing library
• Since a Serum wavetable can have anything between 1 and 512 waveforms, and Shapeshifter only supports 8, it takes the first and last waveform, and takes 6 evenly spread out waveforms between them to form the 8 waveforms (specific waveforms from the table are chosen, no interpolation is done in this step).
  • If there are less than 8 waveforms in the Serum wavetable, it just takes all of them, and repeats the last one until all 8 are filled
• To avoid crackles, the beginning and end of each waveform has a 10 sample linear ramp so that the waveforms start and end at exactly 0
• The wavewriter.py overwrites parts of the firmware .jic file at specific memory locations, AND reapplies the CRC checksum to the firmware file so that Quartus Programmer will accept it.
  • The checksum is CRC-16-IBM-SLDC, found out through 12 hours of digging into the Cyclone IV manuals and comparing changes between Shapeshifter firmware binaries to locate the checksum, and finally applying CRC RevEng when it was clear it was a CRC

How to use

• Make sure you have downloaded the 2.0.4 firmware file to begin with. This will not work for other files
• pip install matplotlib scipy numpy soundfile crccheck to install deps (you can remove matplotlib if you don't want to look at the downsampling results visually, then also remove the import for that library)
• python3 serum_to_shapeshifter.py ./PATH/TO/FOLDER/WITH/WAVS/IN/SERUM/FORMAT
  • This will create two files output.shapewt, and names_output.bin in the same directory as the wav files
• python3 wavewriter.py firmware.jic path/to/output.shapewt INDEX replace INDEX by a value between 0-126 (127 index ie. 128th wave is used for controlling wave selection with Mod B input), indicating starting from where you want to place the bunch of waveforms into your Shapeshifter wave memory.
  • If the sum of your selected INDEX+num_of_wav_files in the wav folder exceeds 127, the program will give an error
  • Given eg. 50 as the INDEX and targeting the Serum "Spectral" wavetable folder with 35 tables (.wavs), the indices 50-85 would be filled with those waveforms.
  • Make absolutely sure you don't target some other file instead of the firmware file, as the script will just overwrite the specified location of the file without any checks whether it's actually the firmware file. So this step is DANGEROUS and irreversible if applied to the wrong file.
• To play it safe, after using wavewriter.py go through your firmware file with a binary diff tool to compare it to the original firmware file, and check that you didn't touch addresses outside the wave name and wave data areas. Accidentally writing somewhere else could cause your Shapeshifter to malfunction.
• Follow the Shapeshifter manual steps to flash your new firmware.jic into the device.

License

It is permissively licensed with MIT (see LICENSE file) so you can use this code directly to build a paid app/GUI for doing the same process or something. A citation to me would of course be nice in that case, or see below for giving me a beer.

Thanks

If you do manage to use this or find the information useful, and you didn't break your computer or synthesizer with this, consider buying me a beer at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tsurba