A repeated theme I am running into as I review many sysex implementations is this: a parameter group which repeats across multiple voices, kits, channels etc. In MOSS, this came up as oscillator types for voices. In K5000, it came up as PCM/Additive wave data for sound sources. I was reviewing a whole bunch of 80s/90s drum synths/romplers as I am keen on buying one. All of them had a similar structure where we need to edit multiple sound sources, each having the same set of parameters.
In my view, not being able to support this is probably the most significant deficiency in Electra today, which is limiting its ability to support a variety of sysex-heavy vintage machines. Here is a snapshot from a section of sysex from Yamaha RM50:
To represent and recall this, Electra needs to use 13 * 16 = 208 controls! But, this is just a portion of the midi implementation. In an ideal scenario, this should map to one channel selector and 13 controls. As the channel selector is changed, the corresponding control values get recalled and shown on screen. With such an implementation, this will reduce from 208 to 14 controls. This way, the available 12 pages will be more than sufficient for most midi implementations.
Of course, this raises the question of memory usage, since one can go crazy, building arrays after arrays, resulting in thousands of parameters in memory. So, overall restrictions need to be enforced to keep the total to a manageable value. @martin, I would love to discuss this if there is some sort of feasibility to support more than 432 parameters mapped to the available 432 controls.
. I need to check the patch sysex as well. The last time I was working on it a couple of weeks back, I ran into an issue of values not correctly being read. Perhaps that is also working fine now with all the latest updates.