Hi, um, mate, please don't take this as a flame because it's not, it's just
a word.
sysex, or to those who actually do advanced midi work, sisex, often spelt in
case anyone's googling them, are just that, system exclusive.
Because of that, they are a pain by nature but can also be very useful and
very powerful.
Not only each brand of synthesizer, but in many cases individual synths by
the same brand, have different ways of dealing with these.
they have always been and will always be cumbersome.
Also, there's no way to actually interrogate a system to find out what sysex
messages it will process/send andor why.
E.g. my son and I have very similar Yamaha keyboards but the sysex messages
don't even look the same.
i doubt this could be coded but if it could it would elevate the price of
the program to a point where nobody could afford it, even if James was even
half way reasonable with charges based on time.
As it is I can't believe James doesn't charge for qws and if he did, I'd be
a buyer.
As for 1 there's a little trick you can do to get around this but I see
Nicole has already written it up, thanks for that, I would have done it as
we use the same method for almost the same reason, I grew up using power
trax, lol!
hth.
Cheers!
-----Original Message-----
From: arfy
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2015 6:51 PM
To: QWS list
Subject: QWS List Thoughts and qws suggestions for more advanced MIDI users
Hi, all. I thought I'd write down here my thoughts and ideas for those
of us who like to do some pretty advanced midi tricks, such as dealing
with sets of controllers, particularly NRPN messages, working with sysex
messages, and a possible alternative way of viewing and working with
midi events. This will be semi-long, just as a heads up.
1. sets of controllers.
While I love working with the qws event list editor, it can get a little
tedious when inputting sets of often, 3, sometimes even 4 controllers to
use NRPN (non-registered parameter number) messages. For example, to set
the pitch of a snare drum, three controllers need to be sent, in a
particular order, such that data entry controller number 6 is always
sent last. It would be nice if all the controllers could just be
inserted, all at the same time, and most midi players/sequencers seem to
handle this fine. qws, however, resorts the controllers so that all the
data entry messages come first, then all controller 98 messages, and
finally controller 99. To work around this, I place the data entry
controller a tick after the rest, which works, but can get annoying when
dealing with a hole string of these. See number 3, below for a possible
suggestion here.
2. working with sysex.
While qws has full support for sysex messages, working with them can be
quite brain taxing! You have to not only remember the strings to insert,
but some manufacturers (ahem, roland?) require individual parameter
changes have a checksum calculated for each of them!
Even something as simple as a checksum calculator would be nice here,
but my idea, and this may be going beyond the scope of James' vision for
qws, would be to have some sort of patch editing/librarian as part of
the program. You could have mini scripts, or settings in ini files that
set up the parameter names, and the messages for each one. I offer this
suggestion because, unfortunately, most editors/librarians I've seen are
inaccessible.
3. An alternative view of events.
Again, this may be a bit trickier, or outside the scope of James' idea
for qws, but it would be nice to have a way to view events of a track,
in some form of text notation. Something where a-g represent notes, a#
for sharp, bb, bf, or something similar for flat. Perhaps it could look
similar to the gwbasic/basic play statement, known as mml (music macro
language) in japan. I have sources available for one such system,
mml2mid, however the comments are all in Japanese. However, this system
can notate just about any midi event, including control changes, sysex,
meta events, and even some text events like markers and queue points,
that qws doesn't support.
This might make it much easier to do things like, connecting a series of
notes using pitchbend messages, which can be done now, but requires some
event list editor gymnastics. It would also just make another way of
viewing events in the midi possible.
Again, if you made it this far, take a prize! or something. Thoughts on
these ideas welcome!
Arthur
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