I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers

13 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by halfradaition
(bipluk.com)

8 Comments

TazeTSchnitzel

10 hours ago

So have many other people. What makes yours special? The vibecoding? The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…

Also, what the hell is a “Hex-to-ASCII Parser”…

tlahtinen

5 hours ago

> The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

Yep, got to agree. The language is just... eugh. It doesn't feel genuine. I could make that comment for a million other sites, but for some reason this one annoys me extra much.

> I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…

It's on the site if you hover over the '80 hardware synths' at the top. I'd copypaste it but the layout makes it unnecessarily difficult.

Also, the site lists the price as both $63 and $49 (I'm in Canada).

Anyway, as a fellow synth fan, to the author: don't be discouraged. But consider writing the website in your own voice.

itomato

7 hours ago

Neat. That's really fancy.

I built something similar to manage sysex messages and patch libraries for my digitech guitar modeling workstation with webmidi: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...

My favorite part of this so far has been spanning a range of parameters in seconds that would have taken a much longer time with gdigi and a completely unrealistic amount of time with the built-in knobs.

I own that FPGA now in a way I didn't before.

doawoo

9 hours ago

> iCloud for sysex

I just have sysex librarian installed and pointed to my iCloud directory. It sure works.

gregsadetsky

7 hours ago

It listed my LXR-02 (connected over usb/web midi) as "Supported" after I connected it, but it did not appear in the list of synths under "backup my synth", nor did "capture soundbank" do anything.

Speaking of the LXR-02, I just just finished this MIDI/patch editor: https://lxr02.greg.technology/ (free of course) - source code link in the footer

SwellJoe

10 hours ago

I've been working on a similar-ish set of tools for my old synths and have been pleasantly surprised to find that synth manuals used to include the full SysEx spec for the synth. Most synths/controllers today don't come with a manual, and rarely provide all the information you'd need to create software to interact with it. They just expect you to use their shitty software, or worse, their mobile app, which will not work in ten or twenty years.

swatcoder

9 hours ago

> Most synths/controllers today don't come with a manual, and rarely provide all the information you'd need to create software to interact with it. They just expect you to use their shitty software, or worse, their mobile app, which will not work in ten or twenty years.

Then if you have some of those old newer and more opaque devices too, you would be doing the world a service to reverse engineer their formats with your favorite AI tool and publish them somewhere. For all the conflicting takes that people can harbor about using AI for vibe coding, technical writing, or creativity, the opportunity it provides for documentation/archive enrichment is tremendous.

So many people would be delighted if six months from now we had "SwellJoe's Sysex Wiki" with docs and scripts for a bunch of recovered sysex formats and some prompt/harness/skill tips to help others expand and enrich it further.