Reference Guide

1072
System exclusive data
Sysx view menu
Sysx view menu
The Sysx view menu contains the following commands.
File menu
• Open. Load a .syx file into the selected Sysx bank.
• Send. Transmit the current bank’s System Exclusive message. If nothing seems to happen,
make sure you have correctly set the output. This command is disabled if the current bank is
empty.
• Send All. Transmit all non-empty Sysx banks.
• Receive. Dump data from a synthesizer into the selected Sysx bank. If the bank contains data,
SONAR asks you whether you want the new data to overwrite the existing data or be appended to
it.
When receiving dumps, remember to connect both the MIDI In and Out ports of the synthesizer to
the MIDI interface. Also, make sure that your instruments are set up to receive and/or transmit
Sysx. Synthesizers that you normally use only to play sounds—for example, sound modules that
don’t have keyboards—don’t need to be hooked up in both directions except for receiving dumps,
so it is easy to forget this. (If you will only be sending Sysx messages to the device, the normal
one-direction hookup is sufficient.).
• Save. Save the selected Sysx bank as a .syx file. This is a good way to copy a Sysx bank
between two SONAR project files. Save the bank into a file, load the other SONAR project file,
then load the bank again. This is also a good way to copy one bank to another in the same project
file.
• Clear. Delete the selected Sysx bank.
Edit menu
• Edit Data. Although SONAR’s Sysx features are designed mainly to store System Exclusive
data for you, you can edit the bytes of shorter messages in hex format (many of the more popular
synthesizers have special patch-editing programs available that let you edit data using sliders and
other tools rather than raw hex data).
When you select a bank and choose the Edit Data command, SONAR converts the binary data
into a text representation and pops up the Edit System Exclusive Bytes dialog box, in which you
can edit the text. If you make changes and click OK to keep them, SONAR tries to convert the text
back into binary format. You’ll get an error message if the text does not begin with an F0 and end
with an F7, which are the System Exclusive begin and end bytes.
SONAR may not be able to convert the data to text format. The text representation requires three
to four times more memory than the data itself, and the Edit System Exclusive Bytes dialog box
can contain roughly as much text as Notepad.
• Name. Enter a descriptive name for the selected Sysx bank. Names are saved only in .cwp and
.cwb files.