Boards of Casio: real CZ-101 patches land in the CZP-1 browser synth

On 24 September the ambionix.com blog published a post about a new patch bank for the CZP-1, a browser-based recreation of the Casio CZ-101 synthesizer. The bank is called “Boards of Casio”, and it is built from CZ-101 patch data that a user known as oliveoil22 shared alongside a YouTube video. The sounds can now be loaded into the web instrument and played.

What the CZP-1 is

The CZP-1 is a software implementation of phase distortion synthesis, the sound generation method Casio came up with in the early 1980s and used in instruments such as the CZ-101. It runs entirely on a web page, and sounds are organised into banks and programs in a Library panel. In an earlier post introducing the project, the author says the synth was built in 2026 with the help of several AI agents, among them Claude Code, DeepSeek and Codex, and that the audio engine took about a week of iteration. MIDI support covers external keyboards and sequencers, with pedals and wheels mapped to the usual controllers.

Loading the Boards of Casio bank

To load the bank, the user opens the instrument page at crazyphase.com/czp-1/ and presses Power, picks an empty slot under Banks in the Library panel, presses “Load bank from JSON file” and selects the downloaded file. The sounds then appear under Programs and can be played from the on-screen keyboard, the computer keyboard or external MIDI hardware.

The author notes one difference: the CZP-1 does not include the post-processing effects oliveoil22 uses in those patches, and that accounts for most of the differences, while the sounds are otherwise very close. Loaded banks are kept in their browser slots between sessions, unless private browsing is used, and can be emptied with the “Remove bank” button.

From .syx files to a JSON bank

The patch data arrived as files with the .syx extension. The author guessed they were system exclusive MIDI data, told Claude, the model that had done the last pass on the CZP-1 audio engine, and, in his words, five minutes later had the JSON file of the bank ready for loading. The author credits oliveoil22 with anything good about that patch data.

Sharing sounds by URL

The CZP-1 also shares sounds through links: pressing Share in the Library under Programs copies a URL to the clipboard, and the URL encodes the sound data itself. Nothing is stored on a server, and links can be freely sent between devices. Banks persist across tabs too, so every open CZP-1 tab sees the same bank data, while each tab can still select a different bank and program.