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Virus MID file surgery

janchlupacek

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Thursday, July 5th 2012, 4:26pm

Virus MID file surgery

Hi all,
I am wondering about one thing and thought this would be the ideal place to ask.

When Virus exports the MID file, what is actually inside of that file? I guess, info about settings of all the patches and banks at the time of exporting, no? Or something else?

Second question is related to this...is it possible to somehow see those settings? Dive into that MID and see info like "OSC1:Saw Filter:Comb" etc? I know this will not help me to build Virus from any soft synth , but could be interesting to see how Virus actually "makes" some of the sounds.

Or even, could someone with Virus help me in this? I mean, send a short MP3 sample of one of the sounds and then info about what settings were set in the Virus.

Probably stupid idea altogether, but it sits in my mind this whole day, so I thought I would give it a shot a get it out.

Thanks for all the possible comments in advance.

flabberbob

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Thursday, July 5th 2012, 5:16pm

You can find most of the information you are looking for in the appendix of the Virus C Manual, p.162, the only difference is that the TI has 2 additional sysex pages per patch, I don't think their internal structure was published yet.

janchlupacek

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Thursday, July 5th 2012, 6:09pm

Virus C is fine, I don't insist on TI version.

So what I would need to do is "dump" the settings from Virus and then I would be able it read that (even if in HEX format)? Is that the MID file?

eugenebalt

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Thursday, July 5th 2012, 6:20pm

Also, just out of curioisity, why is it called .MID? It can be confused with MIDI files.

flabberbob

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Friday, July 6th 2012, 10:04am

Quoted from "eugenebalt"

why is it called .MID?
These are in fact MIDI files. It's just that they don't contain any notes, Just sysEx data.

Quoted from "janchlupacek"

what I would need to do is "dump" the settings from Virus and then I would be able it read that (even if in HEX format)?
Basically yes. You'll first have to tell what is part of the MIDI file format and what is the actual sysEx dump, but you can import it as a MIDI clip into a DAW and open the clip in a MIDI event editor window (Not the usual note editor. You can also use a simple MIDI editor program if you find one) this way it should make more sense.

janchlupacek

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Friday, July 6th 2012, 7:16pm

I tired to import it into my Sonar X1 and checked the event editor, but it didn't tell me much. See the attachment.
janchlupacek has attached the following image:
  • SysX View.jpg

flabberbob

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Saturday, July 7th 2012, 10:44am

When you right click (or command click) an event, does it open a menu with an item such as "event properties"?

janchlupacek

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Saturday, July 7th 2012, 12:11pm

Not really. Right click works like a filter. I can choose which kind of events I want to see. I can edit the "kind" of event and change it to say "SysxData" or "Note" or anything like this, but that doesnt help either. The data field in the slope Data goes blank. And when I keep it as it is, I can change this number, but that doesnt tell me anything either. The data just goes from 0 to 127.

I guess it is a dead end.

noct

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Saturday, July 7th 2012, 8:34pm

RE: Virus MID file surgery

Quoted from "janchlupacek"


When Virus exports the MID file, what is actually inside of that file?

The .MID files contain patch information for the exported bank. Potentially there is other information there, I'd have to look into it to determine what else might be there.

Quoted from "janchlupacek"


Second question is related to this...is it possible to somehow see those settings?

Sure it is, after all, it contains all the information the Virus needs to load a patch.
However, Access knows how they store the data in the .MID files, what each part of the file means to the Virus, and we do not.
At some point, I may return to a project of mine, where I was attempting to reverse engineer this very information. However, unless somebody suggests a better method to do so, it's a very tedious task.
My methodology was to make a patch, change one parameter on the Virus, and compare the old .MID file with the modified one. Well, there are a lot of parameters in a Virus patch!

flabberbob

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Sunday, July 8th 2012, 8:25am

This is not a dead end, it's just that Sonar probably has limited sysEx editing capabilities, so try another DAW or a simple stand alone MIDI editor, or even open the .mid file in a hex viewer, and look for sequences that start with F0 and end with F7.

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