I had previously suggested to use the USB connection for more data intensive things without using MIDI-over-USB which slows down the throughput dramatically.

The suggestion included leveraging USB for firmware updates and suggested that the same USB improvement could backup the instrument automatically before the firmware update so you would have an "All" backup file that is saved on your PC.

Also suggested was this link to be used for transferring big data like user/library files or internal Performance information to help the editors (similar to Melas tools) which are now limited to using the slow MIDI over USB interface.

Also suggested was this link to be used for transferring big data like user/library files or internal Performance information to help the editors (similar to Melas tools) which are now limited to using the slow MIDI over USB interface.

I had to add 'sleep' commands to my Java code that dumps performances. Practically none of them would download completely if I only waited 1 second. But the majority would complete if I waited 2 seconds.

The ones needed 2 seconds or less were about 110K or smaller. Large ones around 2MB took a 12 second wait to get all of the data. Those were the times when neither the M8X nor the computer were doing anything else.

Needless to say you aren't going to get 'seamless sound switcing' over USB.

Yes, this sort of stuff should have a bigger pipe to go through than MIDI1.0 over USB.

With MIDI 2.0 effectively promised this may make things better since the MIDI part of MIDI-over-USB will be less constrained. MIDI2.0-over-USB claims an advantage of "hundreds of times" faster than MIDI 1.0 speeds.

So if we say MIDI 2.0 will be "just" 100 times faster, then that's 120mS for a big dump. That's a conservative estimate although implementation could always dumb things down possibly in the name of easier backwards compatibility.

Overall I still think this should be a more straight forward bulk operation than worrying about also implementing MIDI over this link although MIDI2.0 at the promised 100s times faster rate would be OK.

I have seen it mentioned somewhere by Blake that the coming ESP "Montage M as VST" thing will also serve as a librarian.
We'll see. Hopefully some highly voted suggestions from IdeaScale will be part of it, including firmware updates, MIDI uploads and samples uploads.

While I totally like what Yamaha is promising with the ESP, I'm a bit worried that John Melas tools will obviously not show up for the M. They're proven, they work and the workflow is really great.