[fluid-dev] Short note durations on percussion channel

[josh]

I think the short note duration ticket should be fixed before 1.1.0 is  
released (I seem to remember David suggesting this too?).  I just  
found a PDF file called GM Guidelines Version 2.

http://www.midi.org/techspecs/gmguide2.pdf

On page 20, there is a section on response to Note-off on Channel 10.   
It specifically mentions that GM percussion instruments should ignore  
note-off events.  The exceptions being long Whistle and long Guiro.   
So that probably answers why there are MIDI files floating out there  
with very short duration percussion note events.  I think this also  
applies to GS.

Now the question becomes, what is the best way for FluidSynth to  
handle this?  It would be nice to have a MIDI mode setting, which  
would respond to SYSEX messages which enable/disable GM and GS.  I'm  
not sure if we should try and tackle that by 1.1.0 though.  I'm not  
sure if every GM/GS file has the proper SYSEX messages either,  
although we could let the mode be specified manually.

Perhaps something like this would be adequate:
midi.mode = raw, gm, no-off-percuss

raw: Don't do any special percussion channel handling
gm: Ignore note-offs for all but fast Whistle and Guiro on percussion channel
no-off-percuss: Ignore all note-offs on percussion channel


Any better ideas or suggestions?

Josh