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Jeremy

After finishing up Part 2 of this series, I took a deep breath and got a good night's sleep. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got started on what I thought was going to be the straightforward task of incorporating System Exclusive communication into our editor-in-progress. I had good reasons to be optimistic: this whole project began because I had already made a quick-n-dirty sysex randomizer for the KORG minilogue xd, so I already had the basic framework. Right? Right?!!

In the end, it turned out to be a lot of additional work and that's great news for you, dear reader, because I'll have plenty to chat about in this, the final installment of "Let's Make a Synthesizer Editor". If you haven't read Parts 1 & 2, I highly encourage you to go back and start from the beginning -- we've covered a lot of ground already and I'll assume you've been paying attention!

3_minilogueXD_Tutorial_Part3.zip

From the name alone, you can already tell that we're into elite MIDI territory: System Exclusive messages (or 

 for short) are MIDI messages with some device-specific format and meaning.

If you're a child of the 80s and 90s, you probably think of something like this when you think of sysex -- an unintelligible mess of tables filling up the last 20+ pages of the paper manual that came with your synth and why would you ever need something like that, anyway?

image.png

And indeed, that's the way most manufacturers still present this information, if they publish it at all anymore. Since sysex is mostly used by people developing editor software, or Max nerds, synth developers can save paper (and effort) by providing less beautiful documentation to those users who specifically ask for it. Or they forego the documentation entirely. But don't get me started.

System exclusive messages begin with a header byte (0xF0), then some value(s) identifying what kind of device the message is for, and then generally some values describing what kind of message is being sent (the instrument might know about 20 different kinds of sysex messages, for instance). Then come a bunch of data bytes -- how many and what they mean is determined, you guessed it, by the instrument. Some manufacturers like to finish up with a checksum -- that's a number derived from the bytes preceding it, generally according to some more or less poorly documented math -- which is used to insure the integrity of the data. And then there's a footer byte (0xF7).

Here's a pretty famous sysex message (as they go), which happens to be one of the simplest:

0x20 (Substatus, in this case it means "some kind of a request")

0x00 (Data, in this case it means "voice edit buffer")

That's how you request the voice currently being edited on a Yamaha DX7. And how did I know that? From this delightful bit of documentation:

If you look beyond the binary notation, it's all laid out fairly clearly, just as I wrote it above (including the handy hexadecimal $xx notation). You now know how to get 4 different kinds of voice data from that Yamaha DX7II you've been using as a controller keyboard (or a table).

But requesting the data is the easy part. What's more difficult, and what we're going to be looking at in some detail in this article, is how to parse the data you get back into a form you can use. And then, how to repackage whatever changes you've made to the data inside of Max into a valid sysex message to send back to the machine. It's analogous to knowing how to ask "where is the toilet?" in Japanese -- the answer isn't going to solve your problem unless you know enough of the language to understand it.

Luckily, KORG (which just happens to be Japanese) has provided us with all of the information we need to request, parse and transmit System Exclusive data from and to the minilogue xd. Here's the analogous documentation for the minilogue xd:

Check it out! It's not so different from the DX7 request message:

If you send this to your minilogue xd, like this (Max converts the hex numbers into decimal numbers inside of a box)...

...your minilogue xd will respond with a long message (1179 bytes long, to be precise). You can use the Max 'sysexin' object, or a MIDI Monitor application to see it arrive.

Here's what the documentation tells us about this message:

There's some stuff to unpack here, but one of the first things you might notice is that 

. The data size of a 1179 byte message with 7 header bytes and one footer byte is 1171 bytes and not 384. This is a harmless typo, but the first rule of sysex documentation, as in nuclear disarmament, remains:

There are a number of minor inaccuracies throughout the documentation, and finding them is just part of the work.

More importantly, the description refers to a conversion of "7bit" to "8bit" data, and this is where we'll begin.

System Exclusive data has the same 7-bit limitation of all MIDI data (the 

 bytes -- the ones which tell us that we're about to get Note data, or Controller data, or, yes, System Exclusive data -- use the 8th bit). A sysex message looks like: 0xF0 ... data ... 0xF7, and all of that data is restricted to 7-bit values. The block of data that KORG describes in Table 2 (PROGRAM PARAMETER), which is the data we are receiving, uses 8-bit bytes. Before we can interpret the 7-bit data packet we received from the instrument, we need to convert it back into 8-bit data.

KORG ASCII-arts the conversion method just above Table 1 (GLOBAL PARAMETER) in the docs. And because it's so charmingly unintuitive, here it is:

Clear as mud? It's trying to tell us that every 7 bytes of 8-bit data (56 bits total) will be converted into 8 bytes of 7-bit data by putting all of the high bits into the first byte of those 8 output bytes. Here's my own attempt at some ASCII art.

byte 0: 0GFE DCBA // bytes 6 - 0 above, 8th (leftmost) bits

byte 1: 0AAA aaaa // byte 0 from above, 7 remaining bits

byte 2: 0BBB bbbb // byte 1 from above, 7 remaining bits

and the reverse transformation has to be applied when receiving the data. The 56 bits remain intact, they've just been juggled a bit to fit the restrictions of the MIDI protocol. This technique, or some variation thereof, is used by a few manufacturers (Dave Smith/Sequential comes to mind).

If you've been paying attention during this series, you know what I'm going to say. This is a job for JavaScript if there ever was one. Let's do it.

Here's one way to perform that conversion (there are plenty of possible implementations):

for (var i = 0; i < inputData.length; i++) {

var pos = i % 8; // relative position in this group of 8 bytes

var highBit = highBits & (1 << (pos - 1));

highBit <<= (8 - pos); // shift it to the high bit

convertedData[count++] = inputData[i] | highBit;

This determines the relative position of each incoming byte in its group of 8 bytes (a number from 0 - 7). For each byte position > 0, the correct bit is then grabbed from the byte in position 0 and put back as the high bit.

// slice off the 7-byte header and the 1-byte footer

var data = receiveBuffer.slice(7, receiveBuffer.length - 1);

// do something with the converted buffer here...

var convertedBack = convert8to7bit(converted); // test

post("there is a mismatch at byte " + i + "\n");

post("bad sysex byte, aborting receive\n");

else if (receiveBuffer.length) { // data byte, append to buffer

 function one at a time. When the header byte arrives, we initialize the global variable 

 and then fill that buffer with each arriving byte until the footer byte is read. At that point, we strip off the 7 header bytes and the footer byte and pass the data to 

, getting the converted 8-bit buffer back to work with.

In the code above, you can see that we then pass the converted buffer into the function 

 and compare it to the original input. That's just for testing, to ensure that our conversion functions are working properly and symmetrically. We'll comment that out when we're sure everything is correct.

One of the simplest things we can do to ensure that we received the data we're expecting is to print the name of the patch. Examining the sysex spec (Table 2 in the implementation document), bytes 4-15 should contain ASCII data for the program name.

name += String.fromCharCode(converted[i]);

Alright, sysex reception is working. We have a valid data buffer. The next step is integration of the data in the buffer into our existing Model. For the most part, this is straightforward, but there are a few gotchas:

Let's start with the simplest case, an uncomplicated parameter which doesn't require any extra consideration:

{ name: "PORTAMENTO", cc: 5, min: 0, max: 127, syx: 17 },

Good old reliable portamento only needs a new object member, I'm calling it 

, to identify which byte is associated with this parameter in the sysex buffer. When we need to read the value of portamento from an incoming buffer, or when we want to modify the value before sending back out to the instrument, we'll be using byte 17 of the converted buffer.

But consider "VCO 1 LEVEL", which we used in Part 1. That's a 10-bit parameter, so its value won't fit into a single byte. Looking at the sysex spec, VCO 1 LEVEL is placed in bytes 54 and 55. So we can do something like this to describe that, adding a 

{ name: "VCO 1 LEVEL", cc: 39, min: 0, max: 1023, syx: 54, syxLen: 2 },

In theory, we could accommodate any parameter length in this fashion. Practically, no single value occupies more than 2 bytes in the data buffer for the minilogue xd. Quick aside: the documentation claims that the high bits are in byte 54 and the low bits in byte 55, but the documentation is wrong -- it's the other way around.

The case of multiple parameters sharing a single byte doesn't come up much in the spec outside of some User Oscillator (Multi Engine) parameters and the Step Sequencer. In the interest of time and focus, the Step Sequencer isn't going to get much attention here (although I may come back to it for a Part 4 at some point, no promises!), so I'll skip over that case for now.

The problem of differing ranges is also rare, it only comes up three times. For example:

cc: 88, min: 0, max: 127, enum: [ ... ], syx: 89, syxOffset: 1 },

In the case of enumerated parameters, the enumeration index is stored in the sysex, rather than the CC value. The MOD FX TYPE enumerated value ranges from 0-4 in Max (representing "CHORUS", "ENSEMBLE", etc.), but 1-5 in the sysex buffer, an offset of 1. We can address this with the addition of 

 data member. When reading data out of the buffer, we need to subtract 

 (if present), and when writing to it we add 

The case of data which has no representation in the Model can be solved simply by adding those parameters to the Model (in a special "sysex parameter" section). The new parameters are, for the most part, settings related to the Step Sequencer and Arpeggiator. In any case, these settings cannot be modified with a CC or NRPN message. The "OCTAVE" parameter, for instance, is sysex-only. You can find these parameters in 

Finally, there's the case of complex mappings, which we'll address below.

This integrative work is all done, and if you take a quick peek at 

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Building a Synthesizer Editor with JavaScript, Part 2

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The JavaScript-mtr Connection, Part 1

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A Basic Vocoder Tutorial, Part 3