On Thursday 09 October 2003 21:56, Tim Orford wrote: > > "So, are you all telling me that there are no sequencers for > > linux that support a simple sysex dump and sysex receive, > > you know, by taking a .syx file and throwing it out to the > > machine?" > i'm not saying the situation is good, but i cant see a good > argument for integrating this functionality into a > 'sequencer'. I think many people would say that creating > bloated monolithic apps was the wrong direction to go in. I don't remember which windows app it was, but back in my dark days of doing everything with MIDI synths, I used to be able to have the sequencer send a sysex file containing the appropriate patches for the song to each synth (I had/have a Korg M1 and Yamaha DX7.) It seems to me that an even older piece of software let me do that as well, maybe an Amiga or DOS based sequencer. Of course those boards both predate General MIDI, so you had no way to expect patch 0 to be a grand piano, etc. I'd expect the need for something like that to be rather less nowadays (certainly I do nearly everything with software synths and I can't conceive of a way to set them all up automatically at the beginning of a song without using a fairly rigid framework like Buzz on the PC where you do all your sound generation internally or using plugins, nothing like ALSA or Jack), but there was a time when it was very necessary. Necessary as in "Oh my god, I have 700 banks on this floppy, which one was I using when I wrote this song?!" Rob
