> The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.
Yep, got to agree. The language is just... eugh. It doesn't feel genuine. I could make that comment for a million other sites, but for some reason this one annoys me extra much.
> I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…
It's on the site if you hover over the '80 hardware synths' at the top. I'd copypaste it but the layout makes it unnecessarily difficult.
Also, the site lists the price as both $63 and $49 (I'm in Canada).
Anyway, as a fellow synth fan, to the author: don't be discouraged. But consider writing the website in your own voice.
> "LIFETIME ACCESS" "Own It Forever" "Lifetime Updates"
Who's lifetime? The lifetime of the service, or until whoever is running it loses interest in it? This doesn't seem like a "forever" situation - forever is a really long time.
I run a cloud service side-hustle and I'd never make these kinds of claims.
I've been working on a similar-ish set of tools for my old synths and have been pleasantly surprised to find that synth manuals used to include the full SysEx spec for the synth. Most synths/controllers today don't come with a manual, and rarely provide all the information you'd need to create software to interact with it. They just expect you to use their shitty software, or worse, their mobile app, which will not work in ten or twenty years.
Almost 30 years ago when I wanted to backup my synth, its complete MIDI spec was in the printed user manual. Saving all sysex was just a matter of writing a short C program to send a few bytes to the ALSA MIDI device and then read the response back and save to disk.
No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.
And these old manuals make it trivial to build a midi app for your old synths. The sysex specs are usually so detailed that it makes it very easy for Claude to follow and whatever it comes up with usually "just works".
I've built apps for all my old synths, not just to save sysex patches but also for midi control. It's actually amazing some of the hidden features these old synths have that you didn't even really know about because Claude finds all the connections in some cryptic sysex addendum in the manual.
It listed my LXR-02 (connected over usb/web midi) as "Supported" after I connected it, but it did not appear in the list of synths under "backup my synth", nor did "capture soundbank" do anything.
Speaking of the LXR-02, I just just finished this MIDI/patch editor: https://lxr02.greg.technology/ (free of course) - source code link in the footer
Here is what was happening: when the LXR-02 was auto-detected via Web MIDI, it wasn’t getting populated in the select dropdown, and the modal attempted an automated handshake instead of guiding you to initiate the dump from the LXR panel.
My favorite part of this so far has been spanning a range of parameters in seconds that would have taken a much longer time with gdigi and a completely unrealistic amount of time with the built-in knobs.
When I decided to back up my old gear, I dropped some dough on MidiQuest because commercial software with a long track record and active support is something for which I will exchange a moderate amount of money.
The site has a headline about halfway down the page, which apparently gets machine-translated to the reader's assumed language, probably based on GeoIP as my browser is set to request pages in English. This doesn't work very well... the Finnish-language version of the headline makes very little sense, the second word reads as either a weird homophobic slur with a typo or just plain nonsense.
Apologies for off-topic, but I feel like I'm losing my mind here. Did I not read this same post (with the same comments) several days ago, only now HN is saying that it was submitted today, and all the comments are from today?
HN search and Wayback Machine [1] seems to confirm, so maybe I've not gone completely off my rocker?
21 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadI'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…
Also, what the hell is a “Hex-to-ASCII Parser”…
Yep, got to agree. The language is just... eugh. It doesn't feel genuine. I could make that comment for a million other sites, but for some reason this one annoys me extra much.
> I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…
It's on the site if you hover over the '80 hardware synths' at the top. I'd copypaste it but the layout makes it unnecessarily difficult.
Also, the site lists the price as both $63 and $49 (I'm in Canada).
Anyway, as a fellow synth fan, to the author: don't be discouraged. But consider writing the website in your own voice.
Who's lifetime? The lifetime of the service, or until whoever is running it loses interest in it? This doesn't seem like a "forever" situation - forever is a really long time.
I run a cloud service side-hustle and I'd never make these kinds of claims.
No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.
I've built apps for all my old synths, not just to save sysex patches but also for midi control. It's actually amazing some of the hidden features these old synths have that you didn't even really know about because Claude finds all the connections in some cryptic sysex addendum in the manual.
I just have sysex librarian installed and pointed to my iCloud directory. It sure works.
Speaking of the LXR-02, I just just finished this MIDI/patch editor: https://lxr02.greg.technology/ (free of course) - source code link in the footer
Here is what was happening: when the LXR-02 was auto-detected via Web MIDI, it wasn’t getting populated in the select dropdown, and the modal attempted an automated handshake instead of guiding you to initiate the dump from the LXR panel.
I built something similar to manage sysex messages and patch libraries for my digitech guitar modeling workstation with webmidi: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...
My favorite part of this so far has been spanning a range of parameters in seconds that would have taken a much longer time with gdigi and a completely unrealistic amount of time with the built-in knobs.
I own that FPGA now in a way I didn't before.
did you prompt it to create an engineering post for HN? because there's an internal link that says "HN Engineering Post"
best wishes
https://squest.com/Products/MidiQuest13/index.html
HN search and Wayback Machine [1] seems to confirm, so maybe I've not gone completely off my rocker?
[1]: https://files.catbox.moe/dz3emu.jpg
also, i can't read the text on this site.