Created a website to store favorite patches, would like complete list from Access

    Well, I've got category information entered for 6 banks. Only 24 to go! That's like, 3100 records. <anguished cry> I'm managing about 2 bank's worth of data entry a day. I even re-styled the web page to put the Save button closer to the category selects, and am considering changing those to scrolling selects instead of drop-downs. I'm not sure this is going to be worth all of the effort, but I suppose it's keeping me out of trouble. Man, I wish Access had a list that they would share so I could programatically scrape the information the way I did the patch names from whomever it was that posted the PDF of patch names in ROM. At least I don't have to enter patch names any more like I did for the 4 RAM banks, just fix the few errors from the document.


    Does anyone know if it would be possible to scrape the data from .mid files? If so, where could I find them?

    Zitat von ismism

    Ruari Are you the one from whom I got the PDF file?

    Could be, there's a few different ones kicking about - mine is a modified version of another one I downloaded from somewhere, it was about 90% accurate but there were some patches which needed to be renamed. I thought that this was maybe the difference between TI & TI2.


    If you are using mine you don't have to credit me anywhere for it, most of the work was already done by someone else.

    Yes, it is possible to scrape this data from the .mid files; I figured out how to scrape the names the day you asked for a list of names, and after you mentioned categories, it took about 30 minutes to determine where in the files the categories are. I'm planning on spending some time over the holidays making a tool to scrape at the least the names and categories, and maybe more stuff if I don't get bored; it should be an easy project to start learning a new language with, and I was looking for such a project.


    The factory .mid files are, I think, in your documents section under Access Music, most likely. Also, there are like 70 .mid files of patches on the support section of Access' website.

    I finally understand what you're talking about, nms. I'm a "little" slow. My impression is that I would need far more programming skills than I possess for what you're talking about and even need to use a lower-level language than PHP, which is primarily for the web. (Don't think it even supports drag-and-drop.) My C++ days are far behind me and I wasn't all that good even when I was using it. PHP has some semi-low-level functionality such as opening files, moving the file pointer around, and altering them. Having little else to do with my time while waiting for my disability claim, I'll probably start munging around with those files just for fun. I might even find some use for all of my fiddling.
    Cheers,
    Daniel

    Wow. It looks like my import is WAY off! But this is good news to me: It gives me something to do. I've been able to extract patch names (every 527 bytes after the 274 byte header), but I was wondering if someone could clue me in as to where the categories are. I'm guessing that they are ordinals from 0 to 27 and am hunting around for those, but if anyone wants to save me a little work, I promise I'll listen this time. ;)

    I've only given a quick look into the location of the categories, but I can say this much:


    It seems like there is data stored in two locations for categories... I have to figure out what's up with the second section still.
    The first section is directly after the patch name. I think the first set of hexadecimal is 00 if there are no categories, or 02 if there are.
    I assume the 02 is indicating that there *can* be up to 2 categories, but I may be wrong. Regardless of the number of categories set, it seems to always be 02 if there are more than 0.
    The next set of hex after that corresponds to the first category, and the hex after that, the second.
    So something like PATCHNAME 02 06 08 seems to mean there are categories for the patch and the first is Acid and the second is Arp. I haven't bothered to determine the values for the other categories yet, it should be easy enough but I'm lazy. I'll around to it.
    As I said, there is a second section, I think 5 hex chars after that, but I haven't figured out what it represents.
    I really have to look more into this, as this is incomplete and half guesswork, but hopefully this helps you a little.

    Yeah, my app/site is basically just so that I can remember where the patches I like are located. I finally got around to munging the .mid files and have so far been able to extract patch names for all of the ROM banks. Now, if only I could find the category information. I'll probably modify a patch's categories, then dump the bank and compare it to the unmodified one.
    If any of you folks know what the offsets of the category information are in a patch, I wouldn't mind not having to comb through the diffs. ;)