Commodore Remix

Being a fan of hardware synths. I have some from the 80's/90's that I have instorage and I was wondering how long the battery lasts before it wipes the memory? As much as I like hardware synths this does seem to be their downfall which softsynths or pre battery analog synths don't have.

I don't know about Synths, but my Roland/BOSS SE-50 Special effects processor uses the standard CR-2032 Battery which you are used as CMOS Battery's on a computer.

In the Case of the SE-50 once the battery is dead, all my custom presets are lost, unless I had them previously saved as a sysex or midi file which I can reload.

That is annoying in itself but the other annoying thing is, when I replace the battery, I have to lookup how a system restore is done otherwise everything is garbled, and since I only replace the battery every 3-4 years, you have to have try to remember or find the manual to get this information.

I've had several hardware synths from the beginning of the 80's and up, and never have I had to change a battery in any one of them... maybe I'm lucky? ... they last pretty long though under normal circumstances, and it's not really that big a problem. Just do a dump of the patches via MIDI to your PC, and save them there for backup. Then, if you ever need to change batteries, just change them, and send the patches back to the synth when you're done.