Generating sysex commands/files

[CinningBao]

Sysex is unfamiliar territory for me.. but I need to get familiar

I need to construct a variety of sysex messages, edit, manage, etc.. and I have Sysex Librarian and a couple of hex editors..

My question is: is there anyway to generate the hex file from a 'regular' editor, something which would make it more readable (decimal) while editing, then converting to hex for the sysex file.

I feel like this a very dumb question, but I won't know until I ask folks who know. I mean, do you guys who create your own sysex files write them from scratch?

thanks

[BertKoor]

Sysex messages are just a blob of (7bit) bytes as far as the editor is concerned. Yes, the vendor has put in a meaning in it, probably structures and substructures. But these vary and are specific for each instrument.

If you need to do it often enough, then writing your tool for it will pay off.

[JCJR]

It has been awhile since I did syaex. I don't recall doing it much with a text or hex editor but memory is foggy.

My main use of sysex was writing programs to do the sysex. So in that case as best I recall the streams I needed to send would either be typed into the source code (usually as hex strings) or loaded from files.

The big annoyance with a lot of sysex is that a lot of sysex (not all) needs proper checksum bytes in the stream before it will be recognized by the target. It is pretty easy to write a few lines of program code to automatically calc a checksum before sending a message but this could be annoying doing it by hand with a calculator.

Here is another weird idea maybe not workable or practical-- Open Office (free) spreadsheet or some other spreadsheet program you might own, if you are into that-- At the very least it ought to be possible to easy program a spreadsheet to let you type in sysex streams and let the spreadsheet calc the checksums.

A really deluxe solution would talk the spreadsheet into saving the compact bytestream to a .bin file but I am not a spreadsheet nerd and dunno how feasible. At least you could probably hilite/copy the strings from a range of spreadsheet cells then paste em into a hex editor to save a file. Or maybe the SS would even fight you about that, dunno

I usually worked with hex for sysex or midi in general for programming because most all the manufacturer documentation is listed in hex, so it is a waste of time ever converting into decimal just to make it more human readable.

With a little practice hex is just as human readable anyway. Maybe some hex editors have an option to display/edit in decimal rather than hex.

I currently don't have a hex editor. The last one I had was a nice freebie from Russia and seemed to work fine but the antivirus decided it was a security risk so I zapped it.

You probably need a nice little hand calculator with a GOOD hex mode (sometimes called programmer mode) or a computer or phone/pad calculator with a good hex mode. I have seen some rather bad hex modes on some.

It's a shame about phones because there are a zillion phone calc programs available but nearly all of them suck. A few good ones but hard to find. For some things this still hard to beat a real TI hand scientific calculator. Got nothin against hp or Casio calcs except they get me more confused than TI calcs.

[CinningBao]

Very helpful, thank you JCJR and BertKoor

Yeah I thought about using a spreadsheet to do it, but I'd need to check how many data conversion and stripping methods I would need to go through to turn it into a sysex file, and if that would take longer than just writing in sublimeText and copying to hexeditor..

I will chat to my nerdy pal who could do with a project.. how difficult would it be to build a decimal->hex editor (allows readable decimal with commas, text etc.. but strips it all out on conversion to hex) - I mean, it sounds pretty easy!

Having said that, I expect you're right when it comes to hex becoming more readable the more one uses it; another solution for me would be to just start writing in hexeditor and learning the skill to 'see' the F0 and F7 boundaries!

So many choices! Gonna ask nerd pal first.

Again, thanks