Hello all, I’m new to the community and have quite a few questions, but I’ll start with this one and see where it takes me. I’m about a year into my S90XS, which I’m putting to good use in my duo. It sounds like a million bucks, and is a major upgrade from my old Alesis QS8. However, we’re running into some trouble on the gig. I have a collection of mostly drum/bass sequences I created to back us up, and we’re running them from a USB thumb drive. We find that when we need to deviate at all from the order of our song chain we are very likely to encounter momentary freezing of the process. In other words, we’ll use the arrow keys to navigate from one song through others, and it will stop responding for several seconds, then very quickly process all the backlogged commands we’ve tapped into it. This is especially troublesome when we have a dancing audience eager to hear our next song. My first question is, does it sound normal that this would occur, or is something malfunctioning?

I had considered that a possible solution might be running our show from the internal flash memory, instead of the thumb drive. I’ve managed to save a song chain there (and will be trying it out tonight), but I can’t seem to figure out how to save the actual .mid files there. When I connect the synth to my computer, the computer recognizes that a device is connected, but I don’t have access to the internal flash memory. That has me thinking that if the problem is in fact a pokey usb drive, then we’ll still have the trouble as long as my sequences are running from there.

Bad_Mister, can you help?

Welcome to the Forums

you can copy the .MID file from your USB drive and install it on your internal Flash ROM:

Copying the SEQ to Internal Memory
You can COPY your .MID files from your USB stick into FLASH ROM as follows:

_ Press [MUTLI/SEQ PLAY] to view the SEQ PLAY chain list
_ Press [ENTER]

The FILE LOAD screen will appear…
_ Select your USB drive as if you were going to load a file
_ Press the RIGHT CURSOR [>] to view the content
_ Highlight the .MID that you wish to COPY but instead of pressing ENTER, press [JOB]
_ Select “COPY”
_ Copy to—“INTERNAL”

By copying your .MID files to internal memory - even if you misplace your USB drive you will be able to access your data.

With 192MB of room you should have room for all your MIDI compositions!

Thanks for the quick reply, Bad_Mister! And wow, I can see why I had trouble figuring this out. That’s a pretty elaborate series of steps. I’ll give this a try and see if it sorts out the problem for our next gig. Incidentally, we still had the trouble at last night’s show, where we ran a song chain that I stored internally but which referenced .MID files stored on the thumb drive. I’ll let you know how it goes.

OK, well the gig’s not till tomorrow, but I’ve loaded up the sequences into internal memory, and saved a song chain there, too. I then did some stress testing. Basically, I worked my way very rapidly up and down the song chain, with lots of quick starts, stops, and navigate up/down commands.

Overall, it’s performing just fine… except when it doesn’t. At random, it still freezes up periodically. There’s no particular combination that causes it. It’s completely unpredictable.

I noticed the same thing was happening as I was building the song chain. Adding each .MID file to the chain is a series of some 8 or so button pushes. Periodically, it would freeze for a few seconds as I did this, too.

What do you think, Bad_Mister, is this a defect, or do you think this is pretty typical of the S90XS’s OS? This problem is not the end of the world for us, and theoretically a well planned set list is the perfect antidote. However, I think most of us working musicians have to shoot from the hip at times, and we especially want to make those smooth, quick transitions when people are dancing. I’d sure like to solve this problem.

It’s official.  This board is locking up just as much using internal memory as it was using usb.  Do I have a defective board, Bad_Mister?

It’s been a long time, but my issue is still there.  Just looking to bump my topic back up the list.  Any help to be had out there?

You might want to look at the data contained in the files. If you’re getting the same inconsistencies from both external drive and internal memory the culprit could lie the in data itself. I’d try to test that somehow by process of inspection/elimination. Or it could simply be trying to process too much data and therefore, once ‘changed’ ‘chokes’.