Re: [fluid-dev] New "bank offset" feature and selecting sfont/bank/preset...

[Josh Green]

On Thu, 2004-07-29 at 17:04, Ken Ellinwood wrote:
> 
> It appears to be manufacturer dependent with no clear answer one way or the
> other.  Since the MIDI spec itslef is not available online, I use a freeware
> reference which indicates that many devices ignore LSB and simply set the bank
> using MSB (see links below).  After searching google for 'bank select msb', 
> I'm
> now even more convinced of this.  Nowhere have I seen a requirement that both
> MSB and LSB must be sent to change the bank (except in previous versions of
> fluidsynth).  And in sequencers such as Rosegarden, one must add two seperate
> events to specify bank select MSB and LSB.  So the path of least resistence is
> to just use MSB if there are 128 banks or less on the synth.
> 
> So my proposal of #2 above gets us the best of both worlds.  Using only MSB
> will allow the client to specify 1 of 128 banks in a single control change
> message, using MSB+LSB allows the client to specify 1 of 16384 possible banks.
> 
> http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/midispec/bank.htm
> http://www.swivelsystems.com/support/SG20%20MIDI%20Specifications.pdf
> 

If you look at section 9.2 titled "MIDI Functions" in the SoundFont spec
PDF it basically says the same thing. Here are some modified excerpts
from there:

MIDI CC0 Bank Select - When received, the following program change
should select the program in the given bank instead of 0.

MIDI CC32 Bank Select LSB - When received, may behave in conjunction
with CC0 for 16384 total MIDI banks.

So sounds like the right way to do things.
        Josh Green