Re: Re: Wanted - Forte and PC3K8 sysex, and file descriptions

Thanks for the detailed response.
 
Tried the "reads K25/K26 files" thing and well, our mileage was varied, terrible in places, even for ancient synth sounds.  


 File format information is more important given the pile of sound files I would have to work through.  Sysex is great perhaps for auditioning things as you go along, but batch conversion with remapped data from one machine to another probably won't ultimately involve a sysex step, as it there is no advantage in sending the machine the data.  It's a software task, a database, preferred mappings, and some fallback templates.  I don't think it will be that automatic in the long run, there would be a lot of rules.

Have to admit last week was very frustrating with the Forte.  Kurzweil did reply but were not much help - "we may or may not publish the data in future" - leaving us high and dry.

So we had a chat here late Friday about the work involved, in the absence of readily available information, and the conclusion is that if the sounds cannot be readily mapped, we have no need to stick with Kurzweil machines.  If we have to enginneer the sounds from scratch, we may as well consider using a completely different brand of boards, and certainly one where the sysex isn't some ridiculous kind of "trade secret" - because it isn't.  But I cannot be doing with all this cloak and dagger over technical data.  I have much better things to be doing than reverse engineering new gear, just to migrate a few thousand sounds across from the K2500 and PC3K8.  I have old gear enough for that!

 
I also found the single note repetition rate from the TP40L action too slow (IMHO admittedly, and I'm probably overly classical for most) - it is just not as fast as is needed for some of this work, so that's two good reasons to seek alternatives.  There are some mods that could be tried, but not without custoising the thing.

 

 It's a shame really, because I have stuck with Kurzweil for over 20yrs, and generally been happy to do so.  VAST is quite potent.  But switches and TP10 actions are failing, and spare parts are as good as gone, so we are boxed into a corner.  So, I'll start with finding a faster 88 and graded action, and come back to the synthesis engine.  Everyone makes good synth engines these days, but decent actions?  Well, there's a thing of beauty, if you can find one.

Thanks ever so much for the info.  It's worth compiling all that into a well documented community resource.