I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers
bipluk.comI'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…
Also, what the hell is a “Hex-to-ASCII Parser”…
Yep, got to agree. The language is just... eugh. It doesn't feel genuine. I could make that comment for a million other sites, but for some reason this one annoys me extra much.
> I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…
It's on the site if you hover over the '80 hardware synths' at the top. I'd copypaste it but the layout makes it unnecessarily difficult.
Also, the site lists the price as both $63 and $49 (I'm in Canada).
Anyway, as a fellow synth fan, to the author: don't be discouraged. But consider writing the website in your own voice.
Who's lifetime? The lifetime of the service, or until whoever is running it loses interest in it? This doesn't seem like a "forever" situation - forever is a really long time.
I run a cloud service side-hustle and I'd never make these kinds of claims.
Then if you have some of those old newer and more opaque devices too, you would be doing the world a service to reverse engineer their formats with your favorite AI tool and publish them somewhere. For all the conflicting takes that people can harbor about using AI for vibe coding, technical writing, or creativity, the opportunity it provides for documentation/archive enrichment is tremendous.
So many people would be delighted if six months from now we had "SwellJoe's Sysex Wiki" with docs and scripts for a bunch of recovered sysex formats and some prompt/harness/skill tips to help others expand and enrich it further.
No longer own that synth, but I still have my backups. No reason to believe the raw files would not still work. No dependency on any special software.
I've built apps for all my old synths, not just to save sysex patches but also for midi control. It's actually amazing some of the hidden features these old synths have that you didn't even really know about because Claude finds all the connections in some cryptic sysex addendum in the manual.
I just have sysex librarian installed and pointed to my iCloud directory. It sure works.
Speaking of the LXR-02, I just just finished this MIDI/patch editor: https://lxr02.greg.technology/ (free of course) - source code link in the footer
I built something similar to manage sysex messages and patch libraries for my digitech guitar modeling workstation with webmidi: https://v0.app/templates/digitech-gnx3000-sysex-tool-GC5LzXA...
My favorite part of this so far has been spanning a range of parameters in seconds that would have taken a much longer time with gdigi and a completely unrealistic amount of time with the built-in knobs.
I own that FPGA now in a way I didn't before.
did you prompt it to create an engineering post for HN? because there's an internal link that says "HN Engineering Post"
best wishes
HN search and Wayback Machine [1] seems to confirm, so maybe I've not gone completely off my rocker?
Many of us noticed that, on various topics: it happens once in a while. When there's sufficient interest again, things can bump and it looks like it's brand new but it's actually some kind of holy thread necro'ing.
And when it happens, there's also usually one or two people unfamiliar with TFA necromancing that posts a message not unlike yours.
also, i can't read the text on this site.