TS-12 Musician’s Manual Section 13 — Storage
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MIDI System Exclusive Recorder
What are System Exclusives?
Some MIDI information—such as key events, controllers, program changes, etc.— is understood
by virtually all MIDI devices, regardless of the manufacturer. The common ability to send and
receive these messages is what allows you to play any MIDI synth from any other, to change
programs and volume remotely, to start and stop sequencers and drum machines together, and
the many other performance miracles we have come to expect from MIDI.
There are other messages which each manufacturer has reserved for communicating specific
information with a specific machine (or family of machines). These machine-specific messages
are called System Exclusive (or Sys-Ex) messages, since they are meant to be recognized only by a
particular device and ignored by all others (i.e. they are exclusive to a particular system).
The TS-12, for example, can transfer programs, presets or sequences or via to another TS-12. It is
a lot like sending a file from one computer to another via modem. The 1’s and 0’s that make up
the data in memory are sent out the MIDI port. This data can be received and understood by
another TS-12, or by a computer running the proper librarian software.
“Generic” System Exclusive Storage
It is not strictly necessary, however, for the receiving system to understand the data it receives, if
the purpose is to store it for later reloading into the original system (just as it’s not necessary for a
file cabinet to understand the pieces of paper you file there). The TS-12 can receive any MIDI
System Exclusive message up to 288k bytes and save it to disk without having the slightest notion
of what it means or what type of device it came from. When you want to send the data back to
the original device, you just load the data from disk back into the TS-12, which will then re-
transmit the message exactly as it was received.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of information which you can use the TS-12 to store in this
way:
• The Program (patch) memory of virtually any MIDI synthesizer
• The pattern memory of a drum machine
• The sequence memory of a MIDI sequencer
• The preset memory of any MIDI effects device which can send and receive it (such as the
ENSONIQ DP/4)
In short, any MIDI data (within memory limits) which can be transmitted from one device to
another can be received and stored by the TS-12. With the TS-12 at the heart of your system, you
now have disk storage for the data in all your MIDI instruments.
Saving Sys-Ex data uses the Sequencer Memory
The TS-12 uses the RAM (Random Access Memory) that is normally devoted to the sequencer to
“buffer” incoming System Exclusive messages before saving them to disk. A buffer is an area of
memory where data is held temporarily. When the TS-12 receives a System Exclusive data
dump, it stores it in the sequencer memory until you save the data to disk.
Important:
You must save all sequencer memory before using the System Exclusive Recorder function to receive data.
Loading Sys-Ex data from disk to an external device will not necessarily clear the sequencer
memory. If there is enough unused sequencer memory to load and transmit the Sys-Ex message,
the memory will not be affected. If there is not enough memory, the TS-12 will warn you, and
give you a chance to proceed (erasing the sequencer memory) or quit and save the data.
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