Midi Controller to replace Alesis BRC/RMB for Alesis HD24

[djkalian]

Gentleman (and ladies?),

First of, let me say, thank you, to everyone involved with Ucapps and MidiBoxes, you guys have been an inspiration for the last few years.

I am now finally moving forward with a project I have been planning/researching for quite some time, and I need to be pointed in the right direction. Although, my question may not only be off-topic, but off-forum as well, I am hoping that at least one person in this group will at least have some knowledge of my issue.

So here goes...

I am controlling an Alesis HD24 via MMC/SysEx at the moment, and a BRC when I am not connected to a PC. I have gone over and tested many many MMC/SysEx commands, some work, some don't, that seems to be the nature of things. Alesis has been less then helpful in providing documentation on which MMC/SysEx commands my particular unit will Transmit/Receive. In the past, I had used some Roland devices, and the manuals I have for them have VERY technically documented Midi Implementation Charts. But even with these charts, and the vast amount of information on the Internet, EVEN the information at Midi.org does not have the answer for me.

My question...does anyone, anywhere have an example of how to properly format a sysex message that can be used to read or request a response from a device? What I would like to do is be able to query my device as to what the Track/Record status is and have the machine send back a response showing which tracks are "Armed" or "Disarmed"

Who knows if my particular unit will even recognize and respond to this? What little documentation I did receive from Alesis, it claims that my unit allows manipulation of the Record Mode (0x4C), Record Status (0x4D), Track Record Status (0x4E), and Track Record Ready (0x4F) fields, and it also supports the Write (0x40), Masked Write (0x41), Read (0x42), and Move (0x4C) commands.

I know from testing that I can Arm tracks, using the following format :

Record Ready: F0 7F 7F 06 40 len1 4F len2 tb... F7

Bit #5 (0x40) denotes that this is a Masked Write

Bit #7 (0x4F) denotes that I am setting the bits in the Track Record Ready field

My assumption is that I should be able to use a Read (0x42) command in order to either read the Track Record Ready (0x4F) field, or the Track Record Status (0x4E) field, and use this info to set LED's on my midibox to the proper state. I cannot, for the life of me, find any example, let alone a working example, that shows how to properly format a Read message for these fields.

The reason I post this here, besides the fact that I hope someone here knows something about this, is because once I can get a message sent properly and working, I then want to be able to assign a button on my MidiBox controller to send this, or use it in a "sync" function...

Thank you in advance for reading my long drawn out novel, and if anyone at all can point me in the right direction it is greatly appreciated.

Kris

Edit: Only 30 minutes after I posted this question, I tried once more to google for more information. I don't know if I just tried googling something different then before, but this time, I found the following document:

http://www.pescadoo.net/annexe/max/Max&MMC.pdf

The paper is written for a Macintosh program, but the examples are there, I only need to convert from decimal to hex. I will be testing these tonight when I get home. Hopefully this information is helpful to someone else here, I am hoping that it further enhances the already awesome abilities of MidiBox :)