Proprietary and binary is not the same.
I would agree that binary formats can be more compact and faster, however but I would argue that this kind of concern is unwarranted in a device that renders 8 voices of realtime audio with effects, displays live waveforms and comes with a 16 B SD card, and where the number of files per directory is limited by the firmware to 250.
Specifically we’re talking about a tiny amount of data, patches are between ~200 bytes (FX) to ~800 bytes (sounds) here, and references to macros and samples are already stored as plain text in these files anyway, so the overhead of serializing and deserializing that is negligible. iI would also argue that sequences will actually be smaller as plain text, because at the moment even an empty sequence takes up 2k on disk.
In my experience as a developer, proprietary file formats have zero advantages, but lots of disadvantages. And as a user, I hate that content I create is locked away in proprietary formats especially when it is actually less effort to write open formats from the start.
I figured as much. I was inspired by your very poetic depiction of your relationship to JSON, and hoped to trigger something similar about XML.
@Sandroid I wanted to edit a typo in my previous post, but accidentally deleted it. Normally there is a button to get that back in discourse, but that is not visible here. I had to pull the text out of the editing history and post it again. Is that a a deliberate choice, or can that be fixed somehow?