sysex rate "decimator" (for old gear)

[reklamchef]

Hello,

Some old gear such as the Yamaha Tx81z has a feeble Midi Buffer for receiving Ctrlr messages. I would like to propose a relatively simple filter, one that restricts the stream of sysex messages using decimation (as they call it in DSP) which is throwing away every other message, thus dividing the rate of sysex changes in half (or by any selected increment)

This would not work for all modifiers in a panel, such as those which have a small amount of increments, but the panel designer would choose to increase the ‘decimation’ on parameters that have for example, 99 increments.

Of course, there would arise the problem of inaccuracy, but the way to fix that is to always transmit the value of a modifier at the release of the mouse button.

I have been experimenting with delay settings and it just won’t work for the Tx81z especially when using automation in Reaper for example.

Does this make sense to you?

[atom]

I doubt this will help. If you send every Nth message from a stram of messages, the time they arrive at the device will still be the same, your CPU will remove the messages at the sppeed of the CPU, and still deliver them as fast as it can.

So sending 99 messages and sending 59 messages and sending 30 messages will cause them to arrive at same intervals, won’t that affect the Yamaha anyway ?

Is the amount a problem or is it the amount in a short time the problem ?

[reklamchef]

i think its the amount in a short time when tweaking large incremented parameters too quickly. i believe decimation will work because human interaction still takes time, and the controller messages will be reduced by half if a setting of “2” (throwing away every other sysex message of that specific parameter) is chosen by the panel editor.

and a “send snapshot of currently modified parameter on mouse button release” should make sure the end result is accurate of whatever knob is being tweaked.

the way it works now, is i need to turn the “level” dial of an operator on the tx81z very slowly, else a “midi buffer” overflow will occur. with parameter modulator decimation (throwing away every other sysex message) i would be able to turn the knob a little bit faster. maybe a combination of decimation and delay, carefully tuned, could help address this particular panel.

i wonder if there are other gear out there with the same problem though.

[reklamchef]

Or, possibly some other sort of time based sysex ‘choke’ that only allows a maximum of say, a fixed “framerate” of sysex messages that can be sent per second. 30 FPS ought to be enough for most applications when editing the parameters of an FM synth. If you do a quick sweep and send 99 sysex messages in 50 milliseconds, its just un necessary and overloads the tx81z.

so i guess this is going to need to be programmed from scratch.

[Puppeteer]

The way I’ve seen this done in other software (noteably Yamaha’s Studio Connections) is to simply have a timer at the end of each sysex message (ie wait xx ms), though this is normally for dumps, rather than for control.

The Puppeteer
http://godlike.com.au

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