You can put 51 banks on a single card.

[jp]

I am posting this because I am getting tired of seeing misinformation on ebay about what you can and can't do with cards.

If you have an 8MB card (either SRAM or Flash), you can use soundbridge to burn it with a single bank and up to 50 midi sequences. Each of these sequences can be a sysex dump of a different bank, allowing you a total of 51 banks on a card. To select a new bank, you just play the sequence that represents that bank. It takes a moment for the bank to load, and it overwrites whatever is in your user bank, but it is a nice way to keep a large selection of sounds easily accessible.

You need to convert the .syx files into standard midi files, using a tool such as syx2midi which can be found at http://www.gnmidi.com/gnfreeen.htm

Personally I have a card with all the expando banks, virtual composer, and other banks I have downloaded, with a copy of the original user bank as well. For my own sounds, I use a 512K SRAM card that gives me 8 fully editable banks.

JP

[Rob Shaw]

Thanks! two quick questions,
Is there a program for converting .syx to .mid under mac OS9?
If not, I'll write one, doesn't look too bad.
Then, where can I get flash cards without shelling out $70 a pop??

rob

[jp]

rob,

The program I linked to is an older DOS program (it only recognizes 8.3 filenames, for example) so it should run on a Mac with some sort of DOS emulator. I think all the program does it add some midi timestamps to the sysex file, and write it to a new file. If you are writing a program to do it, it would be worth trying to optimize the speed the resulting sequence plays at, to try to make it load the bank as quickly as possible. Is the transformation from sysex to smf documented somewhere on the web ?

I can't believe that getting cheap flash cards is still an issue after all these years. Still $70 is less than a tank of petrol now... If it helps, you can get about 40 banks onto a 4MB flashcard.

I could zip up my raw files and soundbridge project and post them somewhere if there is any interest. I also have a .img file of my card.

JP

[Rob Shaw]

Well, I tried writing a program directly from the standard midi file format
spec, but I'm probably missing something, as the resulting file wouldn't
show up when loaded into e.g. Studio Vision Pro. But I downloaded
DOSBox, a dos emulator, which seems to run fine under OSX, and
syx2midi.exe looks like it will work. I'm away from my OS9 machines,
but will try some conversions this weekend.

I for one would be very interested in your files, if you could make them
available.

Thanks again for the info!

rob

[Rob Shaw]

The files produced by syx2mid do indeed "play", at least through SVP,
haven't tried burning a card yet. However, a QS bank dump contains
more than 350 sysex messages, and by default syx2midi puts in a 20 ms
delay between each message, which would explain a seven second or so
delay in changing banks. The default can be changed,

sys2midi -ms 0 filename.syx filename.mid

greatly reduces the playing time. There's still maybe a second delay, but
if you're compulsive (like me) you can change the "set tempo" meta event
in the .mid file from 500000 microseconds per quarter note to something
much lower, with a hex editor. Then the file "plays" in a fraction of a
second, though whether this will work when the file is actually running in
the alesis, I don't know yet.

If I can get the source to syx2midi I'll fix the code, otherwise I'll write
a quick C program, think the syx2midi output shows me how.

[jp]

Rob,

When I created my smf files with syx2mid, I left it at the default of 20 ms.

I have found that the banks load faster by playing them from the card than they do by sending a sysex from the computer over a serial cable.

Probably midi-ox uses a default of more than 20 ms when it is sending sysex. It would be nice to get it a bit faster so I'll play with it a bit and keep you posted.

John

[jp]

Rob,

When I play my smf files from the card it takes 34 seconds to load a bank using the default 20 ms delay.

When I use '-ms 0' to remove the 20 ms delay, the smf takes 27 seconds to play from the card. The banks seem to load fine without the delay.

Are you able to play .syx banks from your computer to your QS in less than a second ? How is this possible ? If the bandwidth of the midi or serial connection is enough to do that, then surely the QS should be able to play that fast directly from the card as well.

John

[Rob Shaw]

Hi John,

No, it takes about 25 seconds to send the bank .syx to the alesis via midi,
though it's faster through a direct serial link. But I was hoping it would be faster from a flash card, using your method.

I did try programming a flash card with bank change sequences as
you suggested, and it worked! However it took the full 25 seconds,
and I couldn't reduce it by changing the ticks-per-quarter or
microseconds-per-quarter in the midi file headers. The display says
"receiving midi data" while the bank is loading from the card, just as it
does when receiving a bank from the computer via a midi connection,
and it takes about the same amount of time. So I suspect the alesis cpu
is using the same code path to read the flash card, which in this case is
inefficient.

However the flash card method is still useful, and I learned about the
midi file format, and wrote an OS9 .syx to .mid converter. Thanks,
and if you have any other cool hints, I want to hear them!

rob

[bluesplayer]

JP

I've been using soundbridge and QS8/QSR for years and never THOUGHT to make sysex banks midifiles - duh!

Thanks
Larry

[fungus]

I've tried using soundbridge to format my latin Q card to no avail. It says the card is write protected. Anyone know how to remove the write protection so I can try to figure out how to load the vintage keys on the latin card?.....any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[JD]

First, I just recently picked up a QS 8.1, so Iâ??m still trying to get my head around a lot of this stuffâ?¦

From the original post in the thread, it sounds like I can download the SYX files that live on the siteâ??s QS Sounds page, convert them to MID, write them to a card, and have hundreds and hundreds of programs at my fingertips. Does the same hold for the SYX files on the Alesis web site, or do they rely on sample information that lives on the Q-Cards?

[Stan]

You don't really "convert" sysex files to midi, you "embed" them into midi sequences.
Cakewalk for example allows you to import, embed and even edit sysex files. I believe most midi sequencers have similar options available.

[jp]

[dswtan]

Thanks jp for the 51 banks tip! I have put 12 banks on so far like this -- great!

One caution for flash card newbies like me -- there was a previous image on this 8MB Ebay card that had a nice set of sounds and although I saved the syx from it, I guess I lost the associated samples when I re-imaged the card via Sound Bridge -- since that syx doesn't play sounds any more. Doh!

I also never realized that you couldn't just use a Windows laptop to manage files on these PCMCIA Flash cards using regular Windows Explorer -- big lesson there!

[ann1985]

The King of Queens DVD
Family Guy DVD
_________________
lost dvd
Foyle's War Seasons 1-5 DVD Boxset