Print Genos MIDI Settings

[Michael Trigoboff]

The Problem

The Genos allows you to have up to 10 user-edited MIDI "templates", each of which specifies MIDI settings for the Genos. You can view and edit these settings on the Genos touchscreen.

Since you can have only 10 user templates at a time, it's important to make sure you don't have templates that are essentially duplicates of each other. The template viewer is split up into a lot of separate pages, and this can make it extremely difficult to compare two of these MIDI templates and tell how different they may or may not be.

A Solution

The Genos allows you to save a set of up to 10 MIDI templates in a .msu file. You can do it on the Utility page described on p. 159 of the Genos Reference Manual.

It occurred to me that I could write code to read in a .msu file, and print out each of its MIDI templates as a text file. This would allow someone to look at all of the settings at once for each of the templates, which would make it much easier to compare templates with each other.

You can also use a diff utility like WinMerge, which can show you two text files side-by-side and hilite the differences between them.

I did it as a Jupyter Notebook, which is a very user-friendly way to combine code with the instructions for its use. (This is an example of literate programming, an idea invented quite a few decades ago by Stanford computer science professor Donald Knuth.)

You can follow this link to the Jupyter notebook. I hope it is self-explanatory. Please post any problems or bug reports to this thread.

I hope you will find it useful and enjoy it. I have received an enormous amount of help from folks on this forum, and I am happy to have the opportunity to contribute something in return.

[Lee Batchelor]

Thanks for your great contribution, Michael! I know we've always enjoyed your input - especially as you leverage your computer science skills.

I've never explored the MIDI side of the Genos, beyond trying to integrate it with Cubase. You've given me new hope. I'm explore this function in between stage functions, which are becoming more prevalent now that winter is over in Canada ! Thanks again...

- Lee

[Michael Trigoboff]

I finally got around to using my Jupyter notebook for its intended purpose, and discovered that two of my MIDI Templates differ from each other by just a single setting. It will be a cinch to combine them, and that will free up one of my ten slots. It would have been a pain to compare those two templates any other way I can think of.

[Lee Batchelor]

Well done, Michael. As you know, there are several apps available that do bit by bit file comparisons that detect duplicate files on our computers. It's amazing how much drive space you can free up. You've achieved this on the Genos.