Backing up Nord Lead 2 patches

Hi there.

After a long pause in posting, here's a guide for backing up Nord Lead 2 patches.

What you need for this:
 - Clavia Nord Lead 2 (of course)
 - A computer running Windows
 - A USB-MIDI interface or a sound card with MIDI
 - A MIDI cable
 - MIDI-OX software (free download link)

MIDI-OX is a great tool for synth players. You can do all sorts of MIDI tricks with it, including backing up your sounds on your PC. The software is freeware for non-commercial use.

Nord Lead and other synthesizers often have the ability to export the patches through MIDI as "SysEx dumps". SysEx stands for system exclusive data. MIDI-OX can receive this data and save it as .syx files.


Walkthrough of a complete backup

First, install MIDI-OX and start it up. Connect MIDI IN of your PC's MIDI interface to the MIDI OUT of the Nord Lead 2.

In order to receive a sysex dump on the MIDI-OX, click View --> SysEx...
This opens the SysEx View and Scratchpad. Then click on Sysex --> Receive Manual Dump...
A message box appears, asking you to wait for the dump to complete.

Now you need to send the SysEx data from Nord Lead 2. After each dump, click on the "done" button. You can then save the dump by clicking Display Window --> Save as... 

Here's what to do on the Nord Lead 2:

How to dump programs
Be sure that you are in manual mode and then press SHIFT - DUMP ALL.

Manual mode looks something like this...

How to dump performances
Nord Lead 2 performances are stored on ROM and cannot be edited. Thus it's not necessary to back them up. However, here's how to do it: Press performance to get in performance mode and then press SHIFT - DUMP ALL.

Performance mode.

Backing up your PCMCIA Sound Card

If you have a Nord Lead 2 Sound Card, chances are that it's battery is running dangerously low by now. The battery life is around 10 years, give or take. You can replace the battery without data loss if you do it quickly. But if you want to be sure no data is lost, it's best to back it up first.

Here's how to back up the data:

How to dump program banks 1-3 from PCMCIA card:
 - Be sure that you are in manual mode (not performance mode).
 - Press up key until you have "1." on the left of the LCD display.
 - You now have bank 1 of the card selected.
 - Press SHIFT - DUMP ALL.
 - Repeat this for banks "2." and "3."

Bank 1 from the sound card selected, patch #9.

How to dump performances from PCMCIA card:
 - Press performance to get in performance mode.
 - Press up until you get "1." on the left of the LCD display.
 - Press SHIFT - DUMP ALL.


Restoring backups

You can restore any bank you've dumped easily. You need a connection between the MIDI OUT of your PC and the MIDI IN of the synth.
Just open the Sysex view and select File --> Send Sysex File... 
The bank you have selected on the Nord Lead 2 will be overwritten.


Single program / performance dumps

Doing single program or performance dumps is a lot of help when creating variants. To do a single patch dump, just press SHIFT + DUMP ONE.


Sharing your sounds

When you've done with backing up your precious patches, why not share them with the world?

Electro-music has TONS of Nord Lead 2 patches for you to try out. However, they seem to only archive single patches.

Another great place for browsing sharing sysex data is Sysexdb. There's no Nord Lead 2 data in there yet though. That's why you should send yours there too!

Boss BR-1180 hard drive backup & replacement

The victim, a Boss BR-1180.

One beautiful day, while we were recording some gangsta rap our trusty home studio Boss BR-1180 gave up and went insane. After a reboot, the thing gave a HD read error. The beat must've been too fat...

So it was time to change the internal hard drive, and see if I can safely back up all our white ass beats from it.

In addition to this guide I'm writing, there's another repair guide on the net by some "PJ". It's a good guide, but it has some problems. You don't need to format the new hard drive, even though PJ's page claims so.

If you're planning to follow my footprints and change the internal hard drive, I recommend first updating the firmware of the BR-1180 to v.2.01. After the update, you can initialize one partition a time with it, which gives you a bit more freedom.

OK, back to the issue. Opening the thing wasn't too hard, just had to keep note of all the different screws on the thing. If you manage to mix them up, PJ's page has them color-coded.

Backside of the BR-1180... Why do I take these pictures?

All opened up...

The hard drive, with some foam to get rid of vibrations.

The hard drive has a nice suspension rack that's easy to open. Some silicone pieces minimize the movement of the drive in case the BR-1180 gets hit. The IDE and power connectors are covered with some plastic foam, to kill resonances and vibrations. You have to destroy part of it to get the connectors out. I carefully shredded the foam with scissors and knifes, spilling just a little blood.

The hard drive and it's metal holders.

The internal hard drive is a 5400RPM Matrox 541D Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive with only 20GB of capacity. The drive is one third thinner than a normal 3.5" hard drive (only 17mm thick). There's no space for a normal HD in the BR-1180. If you can't find a small HD like this, you could just use a longer IDE cable, extend the power wires, and connect a hard drive externally! That would be AWESOME. Stupid, but AWESOME.

Close-up on the hard drive.

The hard drive can be easily read with an USB-IDE adaptor or hard drive enclosure. Or you could just shut down your PC and put it in the IDE bus, but then you might also need to make some changes to the HDD jumpers (to select master / slave / cable select).

My Black Box USB IDE HD enclosure has been well worth the 20€ I paid for it...

So I put the drive into my USB enclosure, plugged into my PC and there you go! A drive popped up, containing all kinds of cryptic files that I backed up to my internal HD.

Listing of the hard drive contents. The .BR1 directories contain the individual songs, and there's also some other shit.

You can supposedly turn the BOSS track files into WAVs with this piece of software. I haven't tried it out yet though. 

Properties of the BR-1180 hard drive.

 
The backup process took some time, but eventually it finished and there was no errors. So it looks like the HD is not totally dead yet.

I used chkdsk to correct errors on the old hard drive, just for fun (yea I know, I'm fucked up).

Correcting the old HD's errors.

There was 50 megabytes of lost information on the disk. I'm quessing it was the track that was being recorded at the time of the crash.


Even though the internal hard drive seemed to work fine now, it would be a good time to change to a new one to minimize any future troubles. I could also increase the HD space...

I happened to have a hard drive with similar dimensions at hand: a seagate ST340015A. This one is also an Ultra-ATA/100 drive and has twice the capacity of the original one (40GB). You could also use UATA/133 according to the comments on PJ's page.

The new HD, a thin one like the factory HD.

I plugged the new HD straight in. The HD had some old Linux Ext2 partitions on it, but that was no problem for the BR-1180 to format again. Again, you don't need to format the HD, the BR-1180 does it for you.

When I started the BR-1180, it asked "New HD, initialize now?". I hit no, since it would by default create a single partition on the HD. I have been experimenting with the partitions and it seems the BR-1180 cannot handle more than 20GB partitions. Or, you can use bigger ones, but only 20GB of them will really be in use.

So the best way to initialize the HD is to go to UTILITY -> HDD -> INITIALIZE and from there, select the format mode to be DIV 2, DIV 3, or so on, depending on how many partitions you want. Since I had a 40GB, I wanted to have two 20GB partitions, and I selected DIV 2.

Now initializing...

After the initialization, I checked the partitions from UTILITY -> HDD -> INFO, and two partitions, both 19072 megabytes in size, were listed.

Then I shut down the BR-1180, took the hard drive out, put it again to my USB-IDE enclosure and copied all the old files I had backed up from the old drive. I put the old stuff to the first partition and left the second partition empty as it is (or actually it has one empty song automatically generated by the BR1-1180).

After the copying was done, I put the drive back to the BR-1180 and voilá! I had the old stuff there, and an extra 20GB partition that could be used for new recordings. 62 hours more remaining recording time for free... nice!

Fuck you BR-1180, I win.
WHO'S THE BOSS NOW?

But still, one more thing to do: put some plastic foam around the HD like Boss had done. It probably reduces some resonances the hard drive causes. For this purpose I used an old mouse pad. What do we learn from this? Always have a couple of mouse pads ready, you can do anything with them!

Hard drive in it's place, before adding the foam.

After gluing the foam.

That's all, folks.

Related links:
Boss BR-1180 owner's manual
Boss BR-1180 owner's manual - addendum
Boss BR-1180 applications guide

PS. PJ, smoking around your equipment doesn't cause hard drive failures. I'm pretty sure the fag packs would have a warning sign for that.