...what is Sysexy?
Sysexy is a Perl/Tk-based MIDI librarian program for Linux.
Don't worry. It's much better looking than most Tk apps
you've probably seen before. And because it's Perl instead
of Tcl, it's much faster than most of them, too.
A MIDI librarian is an application which allows musicians
and producers to send and receive data from their musical
instruments and studio gear that is hardware-specific to
only that particular machine or instrument, and archive it
on computer, or send it from the computer back to the
device it came from. This data is usually synthesizer
patches and samples, but it can also be configuration data,
firmware updates, drum maps and sounds, or any other kind of
binary blob of data that only that machine would understand.
Being able to do this effectively makes a computer into a
storage extension for the instrument, which is very valuable
for instruments that come from the dawn of MIDI (the 80's),
since they usually have only meager facilities on board.
MIDI has from the beginning anticipated the need for such a
thing. It is called a system exclusive dump, typically just
called a sysex dump in conversation. Sysex dumps allow a
device to embed an arbitrary amount of arbitrary data into
a legal stream of MIDI, with the only requirement being that
the data must be 7-bit (cannot use the high bit), since the
rules of MIDI dictate that bytes with value 0x80 or higher
are "status bytes" -- the MIDI commands themselves, not the
data, so no data byte can ever set that bit.
MIDI librarian programs provide an easy way for a computer to
send and receive sysex dumps over MIDI cable, or over USB with
newer equipment, since most gear made in the 2010's or later
now takes advantage of USB's support for that (thanks, Apple!).
Linux is no exception, since its handling of MIDI-over-USB is
excellent.
The alsa-utils package in Linux provides the 'amidi' command
to do sysex dumps from the shell. This is adequate for hardware
that follows the rules and doesn't do anything weird -- but this
is the world of synthesizers and studio gear we're talking about.
Some of these devices were made in the 8-bit age, at a time when
MIDI was new and the ink hadn't even dried on the pages the rules
were written on. Sadly, a much more powerful tool is needed to
cope with the idiosyncrasies of the instruments and rack gear
that has been made over the past four decades, and it would be
nice if in addition to offering that, it could also have a nice
GUI interface and lots of other features on par with librarian
programs found on other platforms. And it'd be nice if it ran
natively on Linux and had a small footprint, unlike a certain
Java application.
