I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers | Hacker News Reader

I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers

bipluk.com

34 pointshalfradaition23 comments

So have many other people. What makes yours special? The vibecoding? The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

I'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”…

Yeah, I just cranked one out for the Tempest. It took a lot of manual capture, but I'm not trying to make a business model out of it.

https://www.bitrotten.com/tempest/editor/

> The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

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.

> "LIFETIME ACCESS" "Own It Forever" "Lifetime Updates"

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.

Neat. That's really fancy.

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.

I've been working on a similar-ish set of tools for my old synths and have been pleasantly surprised to find that synth manuals used to include the full SysEx spec for the synth. Most synths/controllers today don't come with a manual, and rarely provide all the information you'd need to create software to interact with it. They just expect you to use their shitty software, or worse, their mobile app, which will not work in ten or twenty years.

> Most synths/controllers today don't come with a manual, and rarely provide all the information you'd need to create software to interact with it. They just expect you to use their shitty software, or worse, their mobile app, which will not work in ten or twenty years.

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.

Almost 30 years ago when I wanted to backup my synth, its complete MIDI spec was in the printed user manual. Saving all sysex was just a matter of writing a short C program to send a few bytes to the ALSA MIDI device and then read the response back and save to disk.

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.

And these old manuals make it trivial to build a midi app for your old synths. The sysex specs are usually so detailed that it makes it very easy for Claude to follow and whatever it comes up with usually "just works".

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.

> iCloud for sysex

I just have sysex librarian installed and pointed to my iCloud directory. It sure works.

It listed my LXR-02 (connected over usb/web midi) as "Supported" after I connected it, but it did not appear in the list of synths under "backup my synth", nor did "capture soundbank" do anything.

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

fixed@!

Here is what was happening: when the LXR-02 was auto-detected via Web MIDI, it wasn’t getting populated in the select dropdown, and the modal attempted an automated handshake instead of guiding you to initiate the dump from the LXR panel.

Just tried it and my LXR-02 doesn't get backed up at all. Have you tried it with an LXR-02? My email is in my profile, feel free to reach out.

Apologies for off-topic, but I feel like I'm losing my mind here. Did I not read this same post (with the same comments) several days ago, only now HN is saying that it was submitted today, and all the comments are from today?

HN search and Wayback Machine [1] seems to confirm, so maybe I've not gone completely off my rocker?

[1]: https://files.catbox.moe/dz3emu.jpg

> 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.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

The site has a headline about halfway down the page, which apparently gets machine-translated to the reader's assumed language, probably based on GeoIP as my browser is set to request pages in English. This doesn't work very well... the Finnish-language version of the headline makes very little sense, the second word reads as either a weird homophobic slur with a typo or just plain nonsense.

whoops, fixed

When I decided to back up my old gear, I dropped some dough on MidiQuest because commercial software with a long track record and active support is something for which I will exchange a moderate amount of money.

https://squest.com/Products/MidiQuest13/index.html

We built bipluk as the lightweight, 2026 browser-native alternative

where exactly is it featured in/on the three sites the above the fold info says?

did you prompt it to create an engineering post for HN? because there's an internal link that says "HN Engineering Post"

best wishes

please don't hijack my cursor, thanks.

also, i can't read the text on this site.

plz elaborate

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