Does anyone store patches via sysex dump

Haven't tried it with the 2.5k yet. The Virus was cursed with a crappy method of storeing user patches. They only give you banks A and B to store patches. Thats 256 user slots. Bad thing is that there are a lot of really good patches in those banks that you are forced to either modify permanently or replace with a modified patch from one of the other banks(c,d,e,f or h). As a result you would loose a perfectly good preset that might act as a good starting point for your patch designing.

The work around suggested in the manual is to dump the 16 part multi bank to your sequencer so that all your patches are imbedded with the multi and stored with it's track. The problem with this is that you would have to create a seperate sequence labelled " what ever the name of your track is_ dump or patch" Yet another process you have to go through before getting back to work on a track. This process takes especially long as compared to software sequencers or else I would just imbed them at the beginning of my sequence. If I do this it won't play back correctly until bar 4 or 5. Not so good for live purposes. I just hate to sample all my synth phrases as loops instead of the more flexible MIDI data. It also cuaes the OS to crash every once in a while. My gues is that it has to due with the rather outdated 96ppq res.

Anyways, I was just wondering if anyone else does this? Also would anyone choose an alternative method to imbedding patches from a hardware synth to a sequence.

well, first off i would never imbed a sysex dump of a patch *in* a song sequence because that's just unecessary and as you've discovered takes too long. i sometimes create a 'setup' sequence for a song but i've never bothered with the sysex data. i guess the reason being that chances are that 256 patches will always be more than enough patches for one show so i'd just load 'em all up before hand and use PROGRAM CHANGEs to pull them up. i personally use a computer for storing sysex data but if you don't have one you may want to consider creating a series of sequences you just use to store sysex data in and the you could do just play back the tracks that you need to have on the synth before you play a show.