Is Midi Designer in 2-way communication with my JD990?

Question

MIDI Target Manufacturer(s): Roland

Please forgive my ignorance and newbness. I bought an iPad specifically to do patch editing (JJ990, MKS-50, Wavestation SR, Oberheim Matrix 1000...) on old sys ex machines. Them got MD 2. Here's what I don't get: MD does not appear to know what the settings are for the currently selected patch jn JD990. MD sends data to JD, but it appears one-way. This renders the whole setup useless, because I may as well be rolling dice. 1. What am I doing wrong? 2.) How do I interrogate the JD990 from MD?

THANKS and please be gentle. I'm new but not stupid.

Comments

Hey there and thanks for your question, I'll drop an email to the author of the layout and answer you. Many of the patch editors don't allow you to collect the patch from the device, since the querying would require device-specific knowledge to parse sysex and MD uses generic MIDI for everything.

Best and happy new year,
Dan (software author, MD)

Answer 1

Hi there and thanks for your question. The JD-990 layout is here, and the topic was already covered in this comment. 

Hopefully you can get some use out of the JD-990 layout even though the presets must come from MIDI Designer TO your vintage synth. Popup spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours on it and has provided it (in multiple iterations) for free to the World. It works within the confines of how the synth talks back and what MIDI Designer can do while covering the broad range it does. It would be great if the JD990 had a way to send its individual parameters back, but Roland didn't implement that (sadly).

Comments

But how come that Midiquest can do exactly this? For ALL synths more or less?
Including the JD-990?

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You could possibly implement this now (2019) in MIDI Designer thanks to Stream Byter. Parsing sysex and converting it into MIDI is hard work though. I would start with one parameter and see if I could parse.

Good luck!
Dan

Answer 2

Hi there and thanks for your question. The JD-990 layout is here, and the topic was already covered in this comment. 

Hopefully you can get some use out of the JD-990 layout even though the presets must come from MIDI Designer TO your vintage synth. Popup spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours on it and has provided it (in multiple iterations) for free to the World. It works within the confines of how the synth talks back and what MIDI Designer can do while covering the broad range it does. It would be great if the JD990 had a way to send its individual parameters back, but Roland didn't implement that (sadly).