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