Sequential Circuits 1 Big Briar 2 Octave / Plateau 3 Moog 4 Passport Designs 5 Lexicon 6 Kurzweil 7 Fender 8 Gulbransen 9 Delta Labs 0x0A Sound Comp. 0x0B General Electro 0x0C Techmar 0x0D Matthews Research 0x0E Oberheim 0x10 PAIA 0x11 Simmons 0x12 DigiDesign 0x13 Fairlight 0x14 Peavey 0x1B JL Cooper 0x15 Lowery 0x16 Lin 0x17 Emu 0x18 Bon Tempi 0x20 S.I.E.L. 0x21 SyntheAxe 0x23 Hohner 0x24 Crumar 0x25 Solton 0x26 Jellinghaus Ms 0x27 CTS 0x28 PPG 0x29 Elka 0x2F Cheetah 0x36 Waldorf 0x3E Kawai 0x40 Roland 0x41 Korg 0x42 Yamaha 0x43 Casio 0x44 Akai 0x45
You'll note that we use only one byte for the Manufacturer ID. And since a midi data byte can't be greater than 0x7F, that means we have only 127 IDs to dole out to manufacturers. Well, there are more than 127 manufacturers of MIDI products.
To accomodate a greater range of manufacturer IDs, the MMA decided to reserve a manufacturer ID of 0 for a special purpose. When you see a manufacturer ID of 0, then there will be two more data bytes after this. These two data bytes combine to make the real manufacturer ID. So, some manufacturers have IDs that are 3 bytes, where the first byte is always 0. Using this "trick", the range of unique manufacturer IDs is extended to accomodate over 16,000 MIDI manufacturers.
For example, Microsoft's manufacturer ID consists of the 3 bytes 0x00 0x00 0x41. Note that the first byte is 0 to indicate that the real ID is 0x0041, but is still different than Roland's ID which is only the single byte of 0x41.
A manufacturer must get a registered ID from the MMA if he wants to define his own SysEx messages, or use the following:
Educational Use 0x7DThis ID is for educational or development use only, and should never appear in a commercial design.
On the other hand, it is permissible to use another manufacturer's defined SysEx message(s) in your own products. For example, if the Roland S-770 has a particular SysEx message that you could use verbatim in your own design, you're free to use that message (and therefore the Roland ID in it). But, you're not allowed to transmit a mutated version of any Roland message with a Roland ID. Only Roland can develop new messages that contain a Roland ID.