Any interest in a new EIII remote control App?

[ddvdave]

Hello Forum,

I have pretty much reverse-engineered all the MIDI messages that are sent from the Emax when the remote control feature is enabled (as the EIII remote app does).

I am working on an EIII remote that run inside Cycling74's Max environment. Since there is a free "player" for Max Patches, this means it should be able to run on either Mac or PC (not sure if Max has a Linux player?).

How interested is the forum in such a remote App? I was also thinking of adding the "Librarian" feature to the App, which would scan all banks on your hard drives to catalog the presets, in an automated fashion.

Just trying to judge the interest level here on the forum. Let me know what you think and I'll try to get a demo of the App put up somewhere in the next few weeks.

Cheers,
Dave

[antenne]

I'm certainly interested, but not sure how i'd incorporate it into my workflow.
I've never used MAX and don't know much about it. - is it a standalone setup
or is it like a plug-in that can be used in the various DAW environments ?
Anyway, the remote appliance i dream of would able of this:

It should be like a combined EIII emulator plugin and remote controller for the EIII
Like a software sampler ( logic's exs24 or such ) with the difference that when i've setup a bank
the remote software can send the samples/bank to the real hardware EIII so it can be played from
there. And can be stored on the EIII harddisc.

Is this possible ? it would be like a combination of the "old" remote software, and Alchemy.

Kim

[ddvdave]

Those are all great ideas, thanks Kim! I'm not sure how I'd implement them without having more of the EIII Sysex documented, but still great ideas!

One of my "far-fetched" ideas is to build a device that acts as a USB-SCSI bridge that would permit SCSI sample dumps from modern software to/from the EIII. This would require custom hardware, similar to the EmuSer, but for SCSI instead of RS-422. That would require an awful lot of reverse-engineering SCSI transfers using Alchemy on an old Mac.

A quick update on my progress:

I managed to further deconstruct the opcodes from the EIII and are able to remotely display the LEDs and LCD on the remote app, as well as push all the buttons.

After reading the datasheet from the LCD, I was able to decode opcode 0x08 to be a control signal to the LCD which is used to clear the display (0x08 0x01), turn on the flashing cursor (0x08 0x0e) and turn off the cursor (0x08 0x0c). I also found that the offset numbers for positioning the cursor (opcode 0x09) are identical in the Sysex from the EIII and the datasheet for the LCD. The final opcode (0x0a xx xx xx xx) is the first one I decoded, and is used to update the LEDs on the front panel.

I found the buttons to send two signals: one on buttonDown, the other on buttonUp. This presented some challenges when coding, as I had previously thought the only button Sysex message was buttonDown. But the Transpose button kept getting "stuck" (as you need to hold it down to transpose). Sending a buttonUp message to Transpose enlightened me as to the necessity to have both working. It'd be nice in the remote control to be able to "hold down" e.g. the Transpose button.

Some other ideas I have had (and partially implemented): I have copied much of the text from the EIII front panel into the Max Patch. This means I can, for example, put a hidden button under the "VCF" part of the Analog Processing section, and have the Patch send the appropriate button sequence (i.e. "Are we already in Analog Processing [led is on]? If so, and we're not in a data-entry field, press '3', otherwise press 'Analog Processing', then press '3'. I imagine these would be pretty handy shortcuts.

Also I have the manual for the EIII remote (a hard copy!), and would like to replicate the keyboard single-character shortcuts (i.e. "M" takes you to Master module, "S" to Sample, etc.).

It's still very much a rough work in progress. If only there were Sysex documentation somewhere

-Dave

[powmax]

One of my "far-fetched" ideas is to build a device that acts as a USB-SCSI bridge that would permit SCSI sample dumps from modern software to/from the EIII

That would be a great feature - to have SCSI Transfers and Panel control within the EIII & HOST Software like SoundForge. As today it is possible in a different/indirectional way to use an ESI & SoundForge via SCSI Dump (hard to find x64 drivers scsi card || usb<->scsi) and safe the data as E3 Bank but you have to make all other things on the panel manually.

regards
powmax

[micromoog]

you read this?

http://eiiiforum.com/index.php?topic=556.msg4497#msg4497

maybe it's interesting 4 u

[who]

Hi Dave,

Have you made any progress?  I am thinking about doing something similar in Max for Live.

Thanks,
who

[ddvdave]

Well I got stuck (about a year ago) writing a remote control App because the software I am using (Max) doesn't have provisions to position the cursor somewhere and delete a character, which is necessary to have a good reliable remote control view of the display on the EIII. I did get all LEDs and button functionality to work.

HOWEVER...

Last weekend, I decided to re-visit the re-creating some of the functionality of the remote control/librarian Mac OS App, specifically the librarian piece.

I decided to write a "proof of concept" piece of software in Python, using Mac OS X-specific Python library, so it's not terribly portable, but it does walk through every bank on a "disk" (CF, CD-ROM, HD, etc.) and cycle through every Preset on each Bank, outputting the Preset # and name for each bank on disk.

Sample output:

Bank B35 Sound FX:

Preset P00: Denver Jets C4 
Preset P01: Denver Jets NT 
Preset P02: Hyper Space G4 
Preset P03: Denver Jets C4 
Preset P04: Rocks & Rips   
Preset P05: Lazer Rips     
Preset P06: Heavy Metal     
Preset P07: Heavy Metal LRel
Preset P98: Design By:SFX   
Preset P99: REV A

I aspire to port this Python script over to something more portable so others can at least have a list of the Presets in their library. Also on my to-do list: to build a list of Samples per Bank.

Note that this is tedious work. Since there is only very rudimentary System Exclusive support on the EIII (basically front-panel I/O only: button presses, LEDs and LCD output), there is a lot to consider, such as where is the cursor, how to ensure unused Presets aren't catalogued, making sure the timing between sending button presses and waiting for the LCD to update, etc.

If any "hackers" on Mac OS X want to try installing pip and then simplecoremidi Python library, they are certainly free to try my librarian script. In the mean time, I'll try to get something more portable written.

-Dave

[ddvdave]

In case anyone's following this Topic, I finally released a beta version of my EIII remote control App. Details here:

http://eiiiforum.com/index.php?topic=2610.0

[mg73]

Wow!!

I will have a go at it as soon I´m at my EIII.
Great work!