[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA and TiMidity++

[John Lazzaro]

> david at gardena.net writes:
> I was thinking about CCs, Program Change and stuff. Is there a 
> standard way of asking a synth for the names of it's patches, or 
> which CCs are assigned to what, for example?

This does seem like the sort of device-independent info that
could be a part of the General Information Univeral ID 
(0x06 Sub-ID), but I've never seen it -- maybe someone with
the MMA document handy could check for sure. This sort of
"request-reply" transaction is the sort of thing the GI
UIDs do, such as the Identity Request/Identity Reply:

http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/midispec/identity.htm

Identity Request/Identity Reply returns enough information
for a patch editor to know what Manufacturer SysEx commands
the device understands. Although a major undertaking, it is
probably is in the realm of the doable to:

 -- Look at a bunch of synth manuals, and see the general
    device-dependent commands it uses to send back items
    like the name of the patch.

 -- Make a small "seed" database of SysEx commands for a
    few types, and write code that reads the database
    format.

 -- Make a networked system for motivated users to send 
    you back updates for the database with their own synth.

In other words, distribute the legwork of finding out all
SysEx command variants for every type of synth, to the 
vast userbase :-). Sort of like CDDB, but on a smaller
scale ...

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John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley
lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu     www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro
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