Transmitting banks during playback

Cakewalk has a special meta-event, Sysx Bank, that lets you play a System Exclusive bank at a specified time in your project. You can use a Sysx meta-event to send any of the 8192 available Sysx banks at any time in a sequence. To do this, you have to insert a new event in the Event List using the INSERT key on the computer keyboard. Next you have to double-click Event Kind and change it to System Exclusive. In the Values column, select the bank (0-8191) that you want to send.

MIDI is a serial data transmission, meaning it can do only one thing at a time. If you try to upload a huge sampler dump during a fast drum solo, playback will noticeably lurch. MIDI must complete the System Exclusive message before it can resume playback. The Sysx meta-event is appropriate only for very short System Exclusive messages. The exact length depends on various factors, such as the speed of your computer but as a rule of thumb, 100 bytes is a likely maximum, and even that may often be too large.

You don’t need to use Sysx meta-events for sending System Exclusive information at the beginning of your project. Instead, use the Auto option for System Exclusive banks. Banks that are marked Auto are transmitted automatically by Cakewalk when it loads the project file they are stored in. Use the Sysx meta-event only when you need to send a Sysx Bank during the middle of the project.

 

See:

Real-time recording of System Exclusive messages

What is System Exclusive?