While exploring the John Melas Master Editor, I discovered that I could set a Master location to point to any Song/Pattern No. from 1 to 128. I’ve not checked but perhaps this can also be done with appropriate SysEx messages. Is this some bug or is there actually a possibility of having 128 Song/Pattern locations in the XF (perhaps with a future update)?

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It’s good to see you posting, VikasSharma!

 

VikasSharma - 06 January 2015 01:59 PM

While exploring the John Melas Master Editor, I discovered that I could set a Master location to point to any Song/Pattern No. from 1 to 128. I’ve not checked but perhaps this can also be done with appropriate SysEx messages. Is this some bug or is there actually a possibility of having 128 Song/Pattern locations in the XF (perhaps with a future update)?

You’ve made an interesting discovery.

In the XF, it’s apparently “sort of” a bug. Via MIDI Parameter Change for Masters, you can send messages to select Mode (Voice, Performance, Pattern, or Song), MSB and LSB for Voice and Performance Modes, and Program Number. Since Voice and Performance banks each have 128 locations, Program Number needs to have a range of 128 possible values. Of course, there are only 64 each of Pattern and Song locations, so the XF should reject any values beyond 64 that are sent when either of those modes is selected, but apparently the XF’s OS doesn’t do that.

If you use the Melas Master Editor, or just send a SysEx message to the XF with the Song number in the range of 65~128 (40~7F in hex), the XF will accept the number and it will be displayed. However, to some degree the XF “knows” there are only a maximum of 64 Patterns and 64 Songs. If you use the [DEC/NO] button, Data Dial, or an attached USB ASCII keyboard to decrement the number, the XF will do so on the display, but if you attempt to increment it, the display jumps to the highest real possibility, and shows “64”.

If anyone wants to experiment with this, the demo version of the Melas Master Editor will allow it. Or, you could send this SysEx while the XF is in Master Mode:
F0 10 7F 12 33 00 1C nn F7
where nn = 00~7F

It would seem to me that no matter what the XF allows to happen, John Melas should change his software so that it permits only legitimate choices to be made, limiting Songs and patterns to numbers from 1 to 64.

By the way, does anyone else find the result of clicking on up and down arrows in the Melas software display to be counterintuitive? I would normally expect the value to be incremented when clicking an up arrow, and to decrement when clicking a down arrow, but the program seems to respond the opposite way, more akin to the direction a computer display scrolls.

As to the prospect of Song and Pattern locations beyond 64 ever becoming a reality, I suspect that there isn’t memory available in the flash ROM to accommodate that, or it likely would have already been implemented.

This thread reminded me of one from about two years ago:
http://www.motifator.com/index.php/forum/viewthread/463622/
More recent OS versions have somewhat impacted what we said there, and I’ll update the situation later with a post in that thread.