FusionSort

[marcos]

Hi all,

For those of you who do not know, I have created a Windows application to help me sort my banks and programs. I have dubbed it "Fusion Sort". I needed something to help me arrange all of the great sounds from Hollow Sun into fewer banks.

Now I can create, rename, and delete banks from my pc. Moving programs from one bank to another is a simple drag and drop operation. I can also change the Category and Alternate Categories of a program.

Feel free to download it and use it for yourself! It's free. The link is:

www.harmonysys.com/fusionsort/FusionSortSetup.exe

Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions!

Marcos

[deweak]

I haven't tried it yet but at first, the GUI is great ! Nice job, I'm impatient to connect my Fusion and reorganize it all :-)

[deweak]

Hey, it works great :-) Very easy to use. Managing banks is a real pleasure with it. Good job !

It should be usefull to add a "preview" function in order to play some little sequences with current program (e.g. one for pads, one for leads and guitars, one for basses, one for keyboards plus a drum sequence), in order to remember how it sounds.

Would it be possible ?

[marcos]

deweak said:

Hey, it works great :-) Very easy to use. Managing banks is a real pleasure with it. Good job !

It should be usefull to add a "preview" function in order to play some little sequences with current program (e.g. one for pads, one for leads and guitars, one for basses, one for keyboards plus a drum sequence), in order to remember how it sounds.

Would it be possible ?

Not right now. When you connect the Fusion to your PC via USB, there is no way to "play" the Fusion because it goes into USB mode.

[deweak]

Yep, that's what I feared.

[jbrannon7]

When I connect to my Fusion using FusionSort I can see programs that I cannot locate on my Fusion even though I am looking in the same catagory as FusionSort shows them to be.

Can you help me?

Joe

[mstsfreak]

jbrannon7 said:

When I connect to my Fusion using FusionSort I can see programs that I cannot locate on my Fusion even though I am looking in the same catagory as FusionSort shows them to be.

Can you help me?

Joe

Could it be that you have some names with more than 16 characters? Banknames and programnames (?) with more than 16 characters do not show up in the Fusion

[jbrannon7]

mstsfreak said:

jbrannon7 said:

When I connect to my Fusion using FusionSort I can see programs that I cannot locate on my Fusion even though I am looking in the same catagory as FusionSort shows them to be.

Can you help me?

Joe

Could it be that you have some names with more than 16 characters? Banknames and programnames (?) with more than 16 characters do not show up in the Fusion

Thats possible but they are Hollow Sun downloads, for instance, Hollow Sun 10 B1 thru B8. I can see them all in Fusion Sort but can only find B1, Mighty Moog, on my Fusion.

Thanks,

Joe

[gwenhwyfaer]

You might need to tell the Fusion to verify its program banks.

[jbrannon7]

gwenhwyfaer said:

You might need to tell the Fusion to verify its program banks.

Thanks for the reply, I have tried that. Maybe I should post this in the Hollow Sun download section. At first I thought it was specific with Fusion Sort but the more I research it the stranger it becomes.

Joe

[falcon]

From your description it sounds as if not all files are copied during the installation of a soundset. The progam-names exist in the bank-files, which FusionSort reports as valid programs. However the missing files on the fusion are interpreted as non-entries on the fusion after a verify command or after disconnecting USB (which seems to verify automatically).

A possible cause of such condition is having a write-cache in your USB file-transfer somewhere. The computer may report in this case that all data is written, but some data may in fact still hang somewhere, waiting to be written later on. If you disconnect the USB cable in such 'unflushed' stage, your data is basically lost and the copy process is incomplete.

It's a good habit to neatly dismount a device after making modifications, thus:
- windows - > safely remove hardware
- linux -> umount
- mac -> dont know

Perhaps you could try to reinstall a suspicious bank with a neat dismount and see if this fixes the issue.

If you are interested in the gory details of suspicious data, you could try fusionrp and run verify_volume.bat. It basically generates a list of items that are mentioned in the bank-files, but could not be found on disk. With this info you could try to track/fix things manually on a know-where-the-problem-is base. (i.e: only re-install banks that have missing entries, instead of a rebuilding everything).

[jbrannon7]

Falcon, Thanks for your reply. I went in the "back door" thru programs, edit, hollow sun 10 and found that all the programs are indeed installed but they are scattered across differant categories. Even though it would seem they are all variations of the same patch they are installed helter skelter.


Perhaps I need to reorganize my HD.

Thanks,

Joe

[falcon]

Ah ok, so all programs where there but the categories were wrong? Hm.... strange. I just downloaded and installed Hollow Sun 10 (missed that one -- great pad sounds by the way but can not reproduce anything odd.

I don't know if reorganizing the HD would do any good. It seems rather that something is/was wrong with the bank-files. As far as I know the category information is only stored in those bank-files and is at the end of each line. A hypothetical cause of the issue could be that the line-endings in the bankfile went corrupt. An editor or a transfer method (such as FTPing a textfile (bank.txt) in ASCII mode) could modify the line endings without being noticed.

This is speculative -- I've no idea whether the fusion is picky on line-endings. But it could be an explanation why FusionSort displays the categories whereas the fusion doesn't. Should you run in this issue once more, it would be worthwhile to check whether the bank.txt has indeed DOS stlye (0d 0a) line-endings.

[falcon]

marcos said:

Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions!

FusionSort is a great handy util. How about a little webpage for it? It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just a download-link with mention of date and version will do. With perhaps some history/info later on. You currently have to download the executable to check out whether you have the most recent version. It would be nice to have another fusion related page too .

[Hollow Sun]

falcon said:

As far as I know the category information is only stored in those bank-files and is at the end of each line. A hypothetical cause of the issue could be that the line-endings in the bankfile went corrupt. An editor or a transfer method (such as FTPing a textfile (bank.txt) in ASCII mode) could modify the line endings without being noticed.

This is speculative -- I've no idea whether the fusion is picky on line-endings. But it could be an explanation why FusionSort displays the categories whereas the fusion doesn't. Should you run in this issue once more, it would be worthwhile to check whether the bank.txt has indeed DOS stlye (0d 0a) line-endings.

Fusion IS picky about line endings/carriage returns and can misinterpret things if incorrect. For example, I might have something like this in SimpleText on the Mac...

Program 1 [CR]
Program 2 [CR]
Program 3 [CR]
Program 4 [CR]

Where [CR] are line endings/carriage returns entered here on the Mac in Simpletext. However....

The BANK.TXT file in Fusion will look like this:

Program 1Program 2Program 3Program 4 [CR]

Fusion will only show 'Program 1' and most likely the category will be corrupted.

If I edit the BANK.TXT file in Word (where maybe the carriage return is perhaps more 'standard'), it's ok.

I don't know the specifics but yes - the line ending/carriage return 'format' is significant.


Steve