Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

On Jul 31, 2012, at 7:31 PM, Jonathan wrote:

> Thanks for the quick reply!
>
> Ok, now I understand how floppies work with the VFX-SD now. It's a  
> shame that there isn't a way to create image files from .syx on a  
> computer, don't know why no one thought of it!

I maybe know :-) There's no reason to think about such a way.  
Everybody just uses floppies to save internal data of instrument, or  
uses MIDI for bulk dump transfer.

Disk hasn't an "image" of SYX file, but it has its special internal  
format different from SYX or MID. Besides many older instruments even  
didn't use MS-DOS standard, so disks are not normally readable on  
computers. But there is some software enabling reading such non- 
standard formats so at least we can copy disks and save to hard disk  
or back-up to CD-R...

For some instruments there's even software which can read some data  
files from instrument disk and convert them to the other data, for  
example to extract sound names... Otherwise there's really no reason  
to convert SYX or MID to internal format, or opposite, in the  
computer. Such conversion can be done easily directly in the  
instrument itself - load data from the disk, send them thru MIDI to  
the computer, and save as MID or SYX (this depends on software). Or  
send SysEx data from computer, and save them on the instrument disk if  
you prefer such format - or if it has some advantage. One can be that  
we can save in one file ALL data of instruments - samples (if there  
are some), individual programs, combined programs (performances...),  
system data, microtunings and maybe more... This way many instruments  
work.

Daniel Forro