Section 14 — Storage
MIDI Sys-Ex
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MIDI System Exclusive Recorder
What is System Exclusive Data?
Some MIDI information—such as key events, controllers, program changes, etc. — is understood
by virtually all MIDI devices, regardless of the manufacturer. The common ability to send and
receive these messages is what allows you to play any MIDI device from any other, to change
programs and volume remotely, to start and stop sequencers and drum machines together, and
the many other performance miracles we have come to expect from MIDI.
There are other messages which each manufacturer has reserved for communicating specific
information with a specific machine (or family of machines). These machine-specific messages
are called System Exclusive (or Sys-Ex) messages, since they are meant to be recognized only by a
particular device and ignored by all others (i.e. they are exclusive to a particular system).
System Exclusive Storage
It is not strictly necessary, however, for the receiving system to understand the data it receives, if
the purpose is to store it for later reloading into the original system (just as it’s not necessary for a
file cabinet to understand the pieces of paper you file there). The ASR-10 can receive any MIDI
System Exclusive message (up to 2 Megabytes standard/16 Megabytes with fully expanded
memory) and save it to disk without having the slightest notion what it means or what type of
device it came from. When you want to send the data back to the original device, you just load
the data from disk back into the ASR-10, which will then retransmit the message exactly as it was
received.
Note:
System Exclusive messages cannot be stored across multiple floppy disks. System Exclusive
dumps larger than 1600k can only be saved to a SCSI Storage Device.
Here are some examples of the kinds of information that the ASR-10 can store in this way:
• The program (patch) memory of virtually any MIDI synthesizer.
• The pattern memory a drum machine.
• The sequence memory of a MIDI sequencer.
• The preset memory of any MIDI reverb or other effects device which can send and receive it.
In short, any MIDI data (within memory limits) that can be transmitted from one device to
another, can be received and stored by the ASR-10. With the ASR-10 at the heart of your system
you now have disk storage for the data in all of your MIDI instruments.
