Saving MIDI SyEx dumps

Jeremy

I’ve always had a hard time with overwriting presets on any of my instruments.  “What if I need that one!”.  Like I’m actually going to need a

Seeing MIDI hex code I thought about Reboot

Seeing MIDI hex code made me think about Reboot

synthesized birth chirp sound.  And yet I still can’t bring myself to overwrite them.

It has become standard with virtual instruments, DAWs and everything computer that you can save pretty much everything.  However I still lament the prevalence of the MIDI standard of 25 some odd years.  But there is hope even with that.

It seems my Nord Lead 2x has the ability to dump all settings as a MIDI system exclusive message.  I just need to find a way to store that data.  Enter MIDI-OX.

MIDI-Ox eases the pain of working with MIDI, if only slightly.  It at least gives an insight into what is going on as well as tools to modify and conform MIDI to do your bidding.

To capture a MIDI SysEx message:

  1. Open MIDI-Ox
  2. From the View menu select SysEx. This will open a window with 2 panes.  The top one for entry (if your so daring as to actually write or modify SysEx HEX code) and the bottom for receiving.
  3. From the SysEx menu select Receive Manual Dump
  4. Send SysEx message from the keyboard.  On the Nord Lead 2x you do this by holding the shift button and clicking Dump One for one program or performance, or Dump all for the entire bank.
  5. Click done.  Your program info should be now displayed in the bottom pane.
  6. Select Command Window > Save to save to a text file.

It’s amazing how little amount of data there is to make up the settings for a single Nord Lead 2x program.  Now I finally can save an unlimited number of sounds.  Here is the sound I saved.  Looks grand!

F0 33 0F 04 00 00 08 04 04 04 07 04 0A 03 00 00 04 02 00 00 00 00 06 04 0E 04 01 04 0A 05 00 00 06 03 0E 07 06 03 0C 04 04 06 00 00 0E 01 05 04 0F 02 03 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 01 01 00 01 00 03 00 02 00 02 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 03 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 F7

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 8:07 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Saving MIDI SyEx dumps”

  • Charles Vincent Says:
    January 27th, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    I used to store sysex dumps including sequences from my Alesis hardware sequencer on 3.5 floppies in my battered Ensoniq Mirage using software called Iquana. The Mirage had only a two letter display, with weird weakly flickering yellow LEDs. Much of it was in hex to compensate for the fact that it couldn’t display three digits but the numbers had to go to 128 or other such astronomical sums.

  • Charles Lindner Says:
    April 9th, 2009 at 12:14 am

    Jeremy,

    I have Nord Lead 2 and I want to back up my sounds. I downloaded MIDI-OX. However, can you load the performance or bank back onto the keyboard? When you say bank do mean all the sounds on the keyboard? I’m a little nervous about backing up my sounds if you can’t tell. Thanks,
    Charlie

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