Rhodes Chroma Polaris

Getting ready to try to dump the factory sysex files from rhodeschroma.com from David Clark into my newly DeRocco'd Polaris! It's great! It works! If I can do this, I'll get my other Polaris repaired and either sell it or bask in the opulent life of twin Polarii (is that the plural of Polaris?).

I ran across this free SysEx Librarian (for Mac OX):

http://www.snoize.com/SysExLibrarian/

Read on other forums it works well and was highly recommended it as a substitute for SoundDiver.

Has anyone used it? Any caveats? Should I reduce the speed of the transmission for the Polaris?

Can I dump the whole batch or do I have to send patches one at a time? I was a little confused by this on the rhodeschroma.com/polaris sysex info page.

I suspect more questions will come, but the answers to these questions should be enough to start getting me in trouble.

Thanks

Richard Sales
richard@...
www.glasswing.com

> ... Getting ready to try to dump the factory sysex files
> from rhodeschroma.com ...Can I dump the whole batch or do
> I have to send patches one at a time?...

Richard - the sysex interaction for the Polaris is a bit more of a
series of commands that get issued (in the one file) vs. just a data
dump (per se).

If you're using polprog1.syx or polprog2.syx files from:

http://www.rhodeschroma.com/?id=polarispatches

then these are complete banks of programs.

I would recommend ensuring that any patches you currently have in the
Polaris (that you want to keep) are backed up first.

You can then try the .syx download and see what happens. The worst
result is that you'll loose the programs currently stored on the
Polaris. The best case is that it 'just works' the first try.

Note: The sysex files are set up for transmission on MIDI Channel 1 -
and so you'll want to ensure the Polaris is configured to at least
lissen to that MIDI channel.

Let us know how you make out.

David Clarke