Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Program to Program Midi Dump in Mac OS X Tutorial

There may be special situations where you need to perform a midi dump between two programs. When one program won't load a saved sysex file off the hard drive (due to formatting issues etc.) but it will accept a traditional midi dump from your instrument that you no longer have, you'd want to do a program to program midi dump. Whatever the situation, here is the tutorial.


What you need:


-Sysex Librarian (Mac OS X)


-A saved Midi sysex program file. This could be a program dump or a bank dump you need to open in another program but can't directly


-Librarian for your specific synth (I used SoundPac. It could be something like MidiQuest XL or even the Manufacturer's Editor/Librarian)




Step One:


Open Sysex Librarian. Under the drop down menu, selec "Act as source for other programs" This initializes an internal midi driver that will become available to other programs. Have your sysex file imported and selected.




Step Two:


Open your host Librarian program. Try to select "Sysex Librarian" as a midi I/O driver. It should be available along with any other midi ports you have connected.




Step Three:


Set your Librarian program, in my case SoundPac, to receive the midi dump. It should be waiting for data.




Step Four:


Press Play in Sysex Librarian. Now the data will have transferred properly between the programs. You should hit OK in the host program and now be able to view / edit that data. Your done!


With this method you don't have to worry about any program specific formatting that incurs. Hope that helped someone!