Swayed v1.0.3 - available now!

[soundman007]

Do wave cards and sysex files from the SY85 and the SY55/TG55 work?

Cards: yes to both
SysEx: only SY55

Thanks Sheaf! It's a long time ago that I had so much fun with a VI

[jbraner]

Here's another question for people that know what they're doing with sysex exports and imports

There's a program called SY Manager, that's cheap and lets you organize SY77 (and other instruments) banks etc. It also comes with a bunch of presets.

It uses it's own file format (.sym files) but it can also save .syx files.
The problem is - when it saves sysex files it loses things like category information.

Actually - SY Manager has fields for:
Name
Group
Type
Instrument
Ver
Comment

Swayed uses:
SNAME
AUTHOR
CATEGORY
TYPE
BANK


I know SWAYED is messing around a little with the SNAME and the long name that it uses in SWAYED - but is there any way to hack these files and export syx files with at least "Category" filled in?
(we can let SWAYED fill in the Bank when it imports, and don't care too much about author)

Basically - it would be nice to be able to import patches and maintain the Category information - to avoid having to add it to each preset in SWAYED.

Is this possible?

[beely]

No, SYX files have a defined format that don't include that information, nor does the hardware support it - so if you are importing/exporting via sysex, you can *only* have the patch data and names - it simply doesn't support anything else.

It might be a better feature request to add in support to swayed for reading those files (or some conversion utility), possibly?

[jbraner]

OK thanks for that.
So sysex will never have that information?
Swayed would have to import the SY Manager files directly?

[beely]

So sysex will never have that information?

The sysex format used by the SY77 was defined during development of the SY77. There is nothing that can be added to that. It's not a general file format you can add more data to.

Swayed would have to import the SY Manager files directly?

That's what I'm saying, perhaps you should add this as a possible feature request (if it's possible, depending on the actual file format).

[soundman007]

The SY77 internal ROM sysex data has several sysex files:
MicTune
Multi
Pan
System
AllData
Voice

Of course I only loaded the Voice data (64) in Swayed. But why can we discard all the rest, in particular Micro Tuning and Pan, since apparently in the hardware synth those were required?

[jbraner]

Swayed would have to import the SY Manager files directly?

That's what I'm saying, perhaps you should add this as a possible feature request (if it's possible, depending on the actual file format).

That's not really going to be worth it - since most people will probably import syx files (from wherever) into Swayed.
So the only way to set up categories is going to be to load each preset one at a time and re-save it.

That's fair enough - I just don't want to waste my time looking for a way around it - if it's not going to be possible

[jbraner]

The sysex format used by the SY77 was defined during development of the SY77. There is nothing that can be added to that. It's not a general file format you can add more data to.

I was just wondering if there were blank fields in there that could be edited.
I guess that's not how it works.
So, most people will be loading in presets via sysex files - and will have to add categories one by one - if they want them...

Thanks for the info

[beely]

I was just wondering if there were blank fields in there that could be edited.
I guess that's not how it works.

Indeed, that is not how sysex files work. They are raw dumps of the MIDI bytes the synth sends/receives that represents it's internal data of each patch (or whatever piece of data it is). There are no such things as "blank fields".

[jbraner]

well, the "blank fields" would be 00 00 00 00 00 00 (for a fixed amount of space) - and a byte editor would be able to fill them with characters

I never expected it would be "easy"

I haven't had to think about sysex files in a long time - since I used hardware synths.

[beely]

well, the "blank fields" would be 00 00 00 00 00 00 (for a fixed amount of space) - and a byte editor would be able to fill them with characters

No, the SY77 encodes it's parameters into a fixed binary format. No one at Yamaha - or any MIDI hardware device maker at the time - was arbitrarily padding their sysex dumps with blank bytes to be used by other things for some other purpose. Sysex dumps were already large enough for MIDI and devices/software to handle reliably, so the idea of making them bigger for absolutely zero purpose is just not a thing.

And then you'd have to modify the source software to print data into those blank bytes (and depending on how the tagging is set up, you might need a lot of bytes to represent that data) *and* modify Swayed to read that non-standard data. if you're doing that, you might as well just read the source files.

Seriously, your idea of putting extra data into the syx messages to avoid some re-tagging work is just not a thing. If I was doing it, I'd use various automation tools on the Mac (in fact, I do this kind of thing all the time) to achieve the same thing and make the re-tagging efforts more automatic.

[braincandy]

This thing sounds amazing and brings back great memories of using it in the university's synth lab many years ago. Purchased. Thanks, sheaf!

[jbraner]

Seriously, your idea of putting extra data into the syx messages to avoid some re-tagging work is just not a thing.

I think we're having parallel conversations.
My idea was just to find out if have the type field in sysex files that we find online.
Now I know that that this field isn't in any of the sysex files - so I was wondering how/why it got taken out.
Now I know that it never existed on the hardware SY77s or any sysex files and is only put there by 3rd party librarian/editors and sheaf

I'm not trying to do anything special - just was wondering where the type field came from and if there was a way bulk edit a bunch of, say, EP presets and dump them in to SWAYED. (to avoid the re-tagging)

It seems like the answer is no.

I'm not trying to challenge you either - I've learned a lot here

Not looking forward to the tagging though...

EDIT: To the rest of the group - so, everybody who's loading presets from sysex files is going to have to tag them all - is that right?

[Uncle E]

Right

[MCMorrise]

I think we're having parallel conversations.
My idea was just to find out if have the type field in sysex files that we find online.
Now I know that that this field isn't in any of the sysex files - so I was wondering how/why it got taken out.

It didn't get "taken out", though: it's extra metadata used exclusively internally by the SY Manager software for the end user to manage their own SY-series data. It would've been manually added by whoever imported those files into SY Manager originally.

What should be asked for is for SWAYED to be able to import the metadata from SY Manager or sy.factory library files, not for a retrofit of the SY77 SysEx syntax with more payload (which would make those altered .syx files incompatible with an SY77 and be a huge hassle to SY77 users if said altered files found their way online).

So, to answer your question: yes, when importing a SysEx file, you will have to do all the extra tagging manually for now.