I have owned a Mesa Boogie TriAxis and Mesa Boogie Stereo Simul-Class 2:Ninety rig for years. I don’t use it much since I focus on the Line 6 stuff but everyone once in awhile I like to power it up and make some noise to justify still owning such a classy rig. I tried to resurrect my old Midiman Midisport 2×2 and get a MIDI sysex dump from the unit to use with an editor and bounce the sysex back to the unit for consumption. I was not able to get this entire flow working, but what I could get working is worth documenting here.
Midiman Midisport 2×2
This is a very old unit. It’s from before the company changed name to MAudio. I download a driver by searching this page where the most relevant OSX driver I could find was for the 2×2 Anniversary Edition and for Mac OS 10.10.1 (the driver was last updated in 2009!). After installing the driver and rebooting the 2×2 at least lit up the USB status LED.
SysEx Librarian
I download the free SysEx Librarian from Snoize. With the TriAxis wired up with MIDI cables to the 2×2 I was ready to attempt a data dump. I put Librarian into “Record One” mode and hit the TriAxis button combo (SHIFT+DOWN PRESET) to trigger a dump. The TriAxis manual states the operation should take only half a second after which the preset digits will blink. No blinking. I pushed it again and the program digits blinked (not the preset digits). Pressed again and the gain control flashed. Pressed once again and the preset digits finally flashed. However, Librarian showed zero successfully captured sysex messages.
The TriAxis is not behaving as the manual says it should. Librarian is not receiving sysex. I have no idea if the problem is with TriAxis, 2×2, or the Librarian software itself. I gave up on this approach.
Fully manual approach
All is not lost. Zip files of many presets can be downloaded from Tony McKenzie’s site. Unzip and you’ll have a collection of .TRI or .tri files. The next step is to convert these to .syx files. This is easily done with the linux `head` program.
head -c 2746 my_presets.tri > my_presets.syx
Once you have the .syx file of the presets you want to try you need a way to view the data contained within. Mark Philpot made available an easy to use online TriAxis editor. Drag’n drop your .syx file into your web browser at the indicated spot on that page. You’ll now be able to navigate to any of the presets to see the data values for that patch. It’s cumbersome to type the values in manually but at least it’s a way to get it done.
Reference links:
- Mesa Boogie Stereo Simul-Class 2:Ninety – product, manual
- Mesa Boogie TriAxis – product, manual
- Mark Philpot blog entry with some of his thoughts on the matter and link to ievms if you are brave enough to try that approach to patch editing
- The Boogie Board has a post with an alternate editor that is Windows only and may be of use to some.
- zip file containing all the .tri files converted to .syx format. Download these ready to use files for Mark Philpot’s site!