Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 07:32:25AM -0000, Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have a Win 98 PC & Soundlib working with a USB MIDI 
> interface of any sort???

[ Not I, so I'll not comment.  I do use a MOTU PC MIDI FLYER (but then
again it's been a while since I actually used it) that is connected to
the parallel port.  If you can't get USB to work, you might try to
find one of these (assuming your laptop has a parallel port).  Then
again, I think they had some problems with win98 as well... ]

> Also, isnt' SYSEX just a byte stream with a little protocol around 
> it?  Why would so many tools fail to send SYSEX dumps to my VFX 
> correctly?  (Or is the VFX that particular about SYSEX formatting?)

This is a "Yes, but..."  kind of answer.  In some ways, the SYSEX
messages are a huge wart on the side of the MIDI protocol.  All the
other messages are short (most are like 3 bytes, if I recall
correctly).  So, talking driver software level here, getting a good
memory management scheme for the transmit and recieve buffers can be a
bit hairy.  

(Just FYI, I haven't done any MIDI programming under Windows or Mac,
but I have toyed with it a bit on the Amiga and under Linux; and I
spent part of my professional life developing drivers for multi-port
serial cards, which is what a MIDI interface is at its heart, although
it has much different timing expectations.)

Have you made sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for your MIDI
interface?  That does seem like the common piece to all your troubles.
Perhaps they don't correctly handle sysex messages longer than a
certain length.  If I recall correctly, you can send single sounds but
not whole banks?  

I can't remember what sysex messages you're trying to send.  I once
knew the vanilla VFX SYSEX messages quite well (not any VFX-SD
extensions, however).  The VFX is not very picky at all about its
sysex messages.  Some other synths (eg roland) have some timing
requirements where you can only send messages of a certain length, and
you must pause a bit before sending the next message -- and bulk dumps
must be split into multiple smaller messages, so these pauses are
necessary for a full dump.  The VFX, on the other hand, does a full
dump of 60 programs in one sysex message, and you can transmit it
without any pauses.

I think it's your MIDI interface (or its driver) that's at fault here.

--> Steve