Comment by SwellJoe

> 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.

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.

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.