Accu-Tuner Midi

[Kent Swafford]

Bill Bussell wrote:

>There does not presently seem to be a good solution to using midi with
>an Accu-Tuner.   

When the SAT III was announced, Inventronics also announced that they 
were developing a new PC program to provide the MIDI functions for the 
SAT. I have heard nothing of the status of this project.

>I don't want to purchase Cybertuner software to use
>with the SAT.  I would like to see a low-cost or no-cost software
>solution to allow sending and receiving data from the SAT II.

The market for such software would be extremely small. And if you say the 
software should be  low/no cost, well then, that doesn't leave much 
incentive for a programmer to develop it. 

>  I am
>working on my own solution to this problem, but maybe someone has an
>idea.  I would even settle for running Atari ST software under an
>emulator.

I run the Atari SAT Librarian software on my Mac with an Atari emulator. 
However, I save the resulting files out to the hard drive and load them 
into RCT to actually send them to an SAT. I would be very surprised if 
you could get MIDI to work under emulation (I can't); I would think the 
timing problems would be impossible.

>It is easy to send and receive data between computers,
>calculators and blood sugar meters.  It should be just as easy and
>inexpensive to communicate with an SAT.  
>
>Bill Bussell

Well, communication is one thing. But librarian functions are quite 
another thing.

If you just want to communicate with the SAT in order to back up the SAT 
data, then you might be able to use one of the MIDI SYSEX (dump) 
programs, or perhaps a MIDI music sequencer that supports SYSEX could be 
used. A problem is that the SAT MIDI implementation was done a long time 
ago and can be difficult for some programs to handle. (The SAT sends its 
entire memory out through MIDI as a single gigantic SYSEX message; more 
modern devices tend to break up the memory into many smaller messages.) 
This is important because it means that a transfer might seem to work, 
but be inaccurate, defeating the purpose of the communication. This is 
why the Atari librarian and RCT have the ability to run the transfer a 
second time and compare the two transfers to make sure they are 
identical. This might be a difficult function to provide without 
dedicated software.

If you are looking to do editing of stored tunings or organization of 
your library of tuning records, then you will have a very difficult time 
without dedicated software. This is because when the SAT was developed 
memory storage had to be as small as possible. Therefore the SAT memory 
is stored in the SAT, and consequently sent over MIDI, in compressed 
form. It is impossible to edit the data while it is in compressed form, 
and as far as I know, only the SAT itself, and the Inventronics and 
Reyburn computer programs are able to decompress the SAT memory.

Sorry I can't be more encouraging.

Kent Swafford