I'm planning to find and load the best DX patches into an SY-99. But where are they? Can anyone recommend a collection?

I played a DX-7 II FD (all these years I didn't realize there were distinctly different models of it?!) recently and was really impressed by the patches on it. I wish I had written down some names to reference, because I really don't believe they could have been the old stock ones. I suspect they were custom.

You may already know this, but the SY is not directly compatible with DX7 sysex. There is a DOS program called 'dx2sy' that does a best guess conversion. It can be downloaded here:

Index of /midi/yamaha/sy77

As for which are the best, well that could take some time to figure. There is a fairly comprehensive culling of DX7 sysex that can be downloaded from the DEXED page here:

http://hsjp.eu/downloads/Dexed/Dexed_cart_1.0.zip

Someone spent some time to cull out duplicate banks, and might be something good to start from.

The Dexed bundle is pretty much complete. I though about writing a little librarian that would delete dupes and let you compare patches so you can delete the almost dupes too. But there's only one of me...

Maybe in the coming months, I can whip one out, but it will probably be MIDI free, it will just make banks and export them. But if I remember correctly, Yamaha's checksums kinda suck and require some mathematical yoga... :(

Thats what I miss about Unisyn (I suspect SoundDiver and MIDIQuest can do it as well.) I could import 100 bank sysex file, they'd be broken up into all their individual patches, any duplicate patches would be removed. The (on a DX7) I'd have 3200 patches (minus the duplicate) that I could then reassembled into banks and export. I still expect to try MIDIQuest one of these days, but Unisyn is OS9 only and SoundDiver is flaky as hell in OSX, and PPC only.

I have the last beta of Sound Diver for OSX, but I ran into a snag with the first synth I tried with it. I think it was my K1m and the checksum was calculated wrong. After that, I never went back to it. I guess I dint do frustration well.

It's a pity that MOTU let Unisyn crawl off and die. I guess they were not selling enough anymore to even bother adding new synths.

There are a couple of librarians out there, but they are either very, very antiquated or rather hinky and I dont want to download them. *sigh* I'm just gonna have to bite the bullet and do it...

Yeah, I have a Logic XS Key, which means the old beta of Sound Diver will not time out for me, but I haven't got it to work well. I recently bought an old 12inch PPC PowerBook that I may try it on. to see if its happier.

My complaint about things like CTRLR is that it just focuses on editing, and basically nothing on the librarian side of the fence. A while back I started sketching out an idea to use python to build editor/librarians. I'm not very good with python so it was an excuse to learn. The idea was to have a master app that handled MIDI communications and librarian functions, and then a standard object spec that let custom object build editors change parameters, request dumps, send dumps, parse dumps into parameters, etc.. Then one object per synth (or more likely one object per datatype, since some synths would need multiple types.) The object would hand MIDI to the master app and the app would talk to the synth, parse responses and had it back to the object. But that would mean writing a librarian once, and each object wouldn't have to think about that, only caring with parsing and creating sysex.

Thanks. I didn't realize that actually. And I have made another mistake many, many times - I keep thinking I will find amazing, curated patches for very popular synths waiting out there ready to be adopted (either free or even for sale) and given new life. Sometimes I can't even find patch banks for sale.

For the SY99, a couple of places to get some patches:

Herbert Janssen: Yamaha SY

The Yamaha SY99 Soundware Archive (Public Domain)

The first location has a big SY99 file that has a zip of converted DX7 patches.

I think I read that they built Unisyn for 10.6.8.