How to Bring Microtonic Presets to Your PO-32

The PO-32 Tonic’s drum engine comes from Sonic Charge’s Microtonic, so Microtonic patches carry across. If you’ve spent years building drums in Microtonic, you don’t have to rebuild them by hand on the PO-32’s two knobs. PO-PatchStudio reads your patch files, lets you check them in the Studio and sends them to the device.

These are your own files. PO-PatchStudio doesn’t include or share any Sonic Charge content, and it reads all three generations of the Microtonic patch format, so older patches load too.

Everything here happens in Transfer & Import, in the Microtonic Import & Export panel.

One drum (.mtdrum)

A .mtdrum file is a single drum, and it goes into one sound.

1. In the Studio, pick the sound you want to replace.
2. In Transfer & Import, under Load Into, choose where the patch goes: Morph A and B (the default) fills both ends, and Morph A or Morph B fills that end and leaves the other as it was.
3. Select Load .mtdrum File and pick the file. If you’ve got the patch as text instead, paste it into the box and select Parse Pasted Text.

The drum lands where you chose, and the sound takes the patch’s name if it has one (unless you load into Morph B alone, which keeps the name). The panel names the sound it’s loading into, so check it before you load.

A whole preset (.mtpreset)

A Microtonic preset holds 8 drums and the PO-32 has 16 sounds, so two presets make a full kit.

1. Select Load .mtpreset Into Sounds 1–8 or Load .mtpreset Into Sounds 9–16 (on a phone, Load Sounds 1–8 or Load Sounds 9–16), then pick the file.
2. Repeat with a second preset for the other half.

Load Into works here too. With the default, Morph A and B, each drum fills both ends of its sound, so the morph does nothing until you change one end. To make the morph move between two presets, load one into Morph A and the other into Morph B. A message pops up to say how many drums loaded and whether any couldn’t be read.

Check it in the Studio

Microtonic and the PO-32 share an engine, but the app plays sounds with the open-source libpo32 synth, so what you hear in PO-PatchStudio is close to the PO-32 rather than identical. Play through the sounds in the Studio, adjust anything that needs it and give each half of a sound its own character if you want the morph to move.

When it sounds right, save it with Save to Library and Kit (all 16 sounds), so you can send it again later without loading the presets.

Send it to the PO-32

Under Send to PO-32 on the same page, choose Kit and select Send to PO-32…. Put the PO-32 in receive mode with acc + sound and select Play Transfer. The full walk-through, with the setup that gets a clean transfer, is in How to Send a Drum Kit to Your PO-32.

Going the other way

You can take PO-32 sounds back to Microtonic too:

• Export Sound saves the picked sound as a single .mtdrum.
• Export Kit… saves all 16 sounds as two .mtpreset files, sounds 1 to 8 and 9 to 16.

A few limits come from the format. A Microtonic drum has no morph pair, so each sound’s A side is saved. Turn on Also Export Morph B in the export sheet to save the B sides as a second pair of presets. Microtonic has 8 drum channels, which is why a kit takes two presets; load each one into Microtonic, or back into PO-PatchStudio. Patterns aren’t included. On a phone, a kit export is one ZIP. On desktop, exports go to your Downloads folder.

For the full reference, see Microtonic Import and Export.

Get started

PO-PatchStudio is free to download, with no licence or trial: get it for your computer or phone.

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PO-PatchStudio is an independent app from SquareWave Studio. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Teenage Engineering AB or Sonic Charge.