Hello all, hoping someone on here can help - I’m trying to write some code to talk to the Motif ES using sysex and bulk dumps. I can successfully connect and receive messages from it (using a USB->midi adapter as I need it to be class-compliant) but the format of the sysex does not seem to tie up with the format specified in the data list manual. I am capturing a bulk dump of a voice - triggered manually from the synth, and the first thing I get back is the sequence:
0xF0, 0x43, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0E, 0x0F, 0x00, 0x63, 0xF7.
This is a valid sysex in terms of having the right start/end bytes and manufacturer ID, the address (0x0E, 0x0F, 0x00) looks plausible, and the checksum (0x63) is correct I believe, but I was expecting to get 0x7F as the 4th byte with another 0 following (model ID). My code throws the message away as it is expecting to find the model ID in there - is this message correct and the manual wrong, or does the model ID only apply for messages input to the synth, rather than output from it? It seems unlikely that the USB midi device or driver I am using is at fault as the message is a valid sysex format.
Thanks!

With your ES, you’re getting…
F0 43 00 00 0E 0F 00 63 F7

With the XF, the first message of a SysEx dump is…
F0 43 00 7F 12 00 00 0E 0F 00 63 F7

With your ES, I’d expect…
F0 43 00 7F 00 00 00 0E 0F 00 63 F7
(That’s the same message as for the XF, except for the fifth byte, which is the second Model ID one.)

You didn’t say which USB/MIDI adapter you’re using. There can be problems handling SysEx with some of them, especially inexpensive ones - dropped/mangled bytes aren’t uncommon. Sometimes experimenting with buffer size and data pacing can help. If not, and if you can’t use the USB TO HOST connection with a Yamaha USB MIDI driver, then you might want to try a different USB/MIDI adapter.

Thanks for the suggestion - I am using a pretty cheap adapter so it might be related to that - I have a Lexicon Lambda somewhere I could try instead to see if that gives anything different, although the I did try the same thing quite a few times and got the same result, might also try it with a standard sysex utility on my laptop to see how it behaves (the code I’m writing is for android btw).

robert_hirst - 24 February 2016 11:41 AM

Thanks for the suggestion - I am using a pretty cheap adapter so it might be related to that - I have a Lexicon Lambda somewhere I could try instead to see if that gives anything different, although the I did try the same thing quite a few times and got the same result, might also try it with a standard sysex utility on my laptop to see how it behaves (the code I’m writing is for android btw).

You’re welcome.

If running a PC with Windows, MIDI-OX is my favorite utility.

I seem to recall Jamal from Gospel Musicians hooked his ES up to an iPad so the USB is “sort of” class compliant.

I’m sure the multiple port stuff for remote control and such won’t work, but the connection to the ES itself might. Have you tried it?

Watch this video!

meatballfulton - 24 February 2016 06:05 PM

I seem to recall Jamal from Gospel Musicians hooked his ES up to an iPad so the USB is “sort of” class compliant.

I’m sure the multiple port stuff for remote control and such won’t work, but the connection to the ES itself might. Have you tried it?

Watch this video!

Yes. I was also surprised when I connect my Motif ES using USB cable to iPad 2 over Cammera Connection Kit. When I started Cubasis, in the list of connected MIDI devices I’ve seen Yamaha Motif ES!

Alex

Just as some background to this - I’m basically writing (or at least trying to write!) an editor for the motif to run on android phones/tablets.  Partially as it would be useful to me, partially just to give me something to try out android programming with. Up until android 6 (Marshmallow) there is no inbuilt support for midi, and as very few phones have 6.0 yet I am trying to avoid using the new midi features, instead using a separate USB->midi driver that is available on github. This driver doesn’t appear to recognise the direct motif USB connection, but does appear to work with class-compliant USB midi interfaces. I did a test last night connecting the el-cheapo USB adapter I was using to my laptop with midi-ox and that showed there is indeed corruption of sysex messages going on - there were a few got through with complete messages, but the majority showed missing bytes, invalid product ids etc, Did a bit of googling and it seems cheap adapters are generally very poor at sysex in particular, although probably ok for general note-on/note-off stuff. So, going to look into getting something better quality - maybe the Roland UM1 as that seems to have good reports on sysex reliability.