1Monday, October 14, 2002
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3    In case you didn't think I was geeky enough...
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5    I bought a stack of musical equipment recently, including a mixing desk and a MIDI sound module by an italian company called ORLA. The sound module (a "MicroPartner") is quite small for what it does, about the size of a block of ground coffee. It's got one control - volume - and the rest of it is controlled is over a MIDI cable connected to a keyboard, computer, etc. MIDI is simply "performance information", not sound. Imagine sheet music: "play this note here, this loud. Now release it". So, here's the deal. I want to connect my computer to my MIDI stuff to generate sounds, and from there to the mixing desk. I have two sound sources - the new one, and an older drum machine. The drum machine has really good drum sounds, so I want to use it for drums, and the ORLA for other sounds, like piano, bass, etc. Simple - you send a MIDI signal to the MicroPartner to disable the drum track.
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7    Aha. Here's the problem: The MicroPartner comes with NO manual. It comes in a dinky cardboard box, little bigger than it (i.e. smaller than the average Tom Clancy novel), with ONE SHEET of paper, Italian on one side, English on the other. The sheet says "Thanks for buying me, plug your keyboard here, your headphones here, your amplifier here, look on the top of me for the sounds, and tweak this knob to raise or lower the volume". And has a few pictures. Now, normally a MIDI device comes with a detailed MIDI specification, including what system exclusive (SysEx) messages it accepts, to (for example) disable certain MIDI channels. If I'm sending out MIDI stuff on a wire, and I want only the drum machine to make noise on channel 10, I'll disable that channel on the MicroPartner by sending a sysex message that says something like "Oy! SysEx here. Only listen to the following if you're made by ORLA. Only listen to the following if you're a MicroPartner. Now disable channel 10. End of SysEx" (note to other nerds: it ends up looking more like "F7 41 00 42 10 21 40 10 F0") The problem is that the whole thing about SysEx is that it's different for each manufacturer, and different for each model. So, I looked again at the sheet of paper. Nothing about SysEx. For something that's controlled almost entirely over the wire, that's pretty crappy. So I went to ORLA's website to see what I could find. They're an accordion and organ company. Eeek. With some additional things (like sound modules) for accordion and organ players. But nothing about the MicroPartner. Hmm. So began my voyage of discovery.
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9    A google or two later, I was no better off - My search for "ORLA MicroPartner" returned a few things:
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11        The shop I bought it (Thomann.de, a German place with good prices)
12        A German recording studio that obviously bought lots of other stuff from Thomann,
13        and some other German shop
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15    By now it's quite possible that this page has made its way into Google.[Editor's note: as of 2003-06-24, we come top of the list.] Maybe someone will find it helpful - mail me if so :-)
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17    I think you're starting to see where this is going. Apparently the thing doesn't exist. So I went to the newsgroups, using http://groups.google.com. When all else fails, Google. When that fails, go to the newsgroups. And lo and behold, there were one or two references to the MicroPartner, citing it as a cheapo MIDI sound source. Yay google, like I needed to spend hours to find that out.
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19    I mailed ORLA, who replied two days later:
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22        Dear Sir
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24        we do not have our technician available for the next few days and we will be
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26        able to give you areplay as soon as he is back.
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28        Orla Italy 
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30    Nice man. Meanwhile, I'm getting more and more intrigued by this. It HAS to have SysEx! I've never come across a MIDI device with no SysEx! So I took it apart, hoping to find something inside that'd give me further information. A possibility was that ORLA bought in the boxes from some other manufacturer and just rebadged them and shipped them with no documentation on the cheap (note to readers - I have a little background in electronics, so I kinda know what I'm doing, a little). The board was just a board, without going into details, very simple really. But there was a big chip in the middle, with "Dream" written on in lovely musical writing, and a number "SAM9273M". Hmmm, I thought. Maybe Dream will have something.
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32    http://www.dream.fr/ was what I was looking for, except they've since been bought out by ATMEL, some American company. So I go to http://www.atmel.com, do a search for the chip number, and come up with a blank. I did find some other Dream chips, including the SAM9773 (similar enough when you're desperate), so I downloaded a few PDFs that seemed to have what I was looking for, if for a completely different chip.
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34    In the meantime I'd found a completely different device called a MIDI Brick, similar to (if a lot better and more expensive than) the MicroPartner. It also used a Dream chip, and had a downloadable User's Guide (also PDF). So I had a stack of PDFs with some MIDI information (including SysEx) for chips by the same manufacturer as mine, but all different part numbers. Sigh.
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36    Also in parallel, I found that the manufacturer ID for Dream (the number that follows the SysEx heads-up in the MIDI message, i.e. the bit just after the F7) was allegedly 00 20 00. More on this later...
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38    So in a fit of pique, I scanned through the PDFs, and noticed that the SysEx information to disable a channel was the same for the different models of chip. Hmm. Admittedly, they were all in the same family, all had numbers like SAM97xx, whereas mine was a SAM9273, probably older. Also, the manufacturer's ID in the SysEx messages was 41, which is Roland's ID (Roland are the most prolific manufacturers of synthesisers, you've possibly even heard of them). Intriguing. A short google later and I found that Dream are/were being sued by Roland. Nevermind.
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40    So I tried that particular string of numbers, and it worked. First time. I was amazed. So now I'm going to try some of the other settings. Who knows, maybe my €90 heap of **** is actually not that bad after all? I might be able to get all sorts of sweepy wacka-wacka noises out of it...
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42    On another note, I played a gig last night with my ex-band, and I might be rejoining them in a week or two. I miss it, and now that the academic year is over, I might have time again :-) Watch this space...
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50    posted by Jeremy Smyth 18:27  |