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Re: [fluid-dev] Short note durations on percussion channel


From: S. Christian Collins
Subject: Re: [fluid-dev] Short note durations on percussion channel
Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:57:58 -0500
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090817)

My 2 cents: I'm pretty sure the Creative synths don't ignore note-off, and I don't think it's necessary, because this should be taken care of in the SoundFont design, IMO.  In the SoundFont's percussion bank, the release phase of each sample allows the drum to be sustained even when the note is released very quickly, and this is how GeneralUser GS and pretty much every other GM bank behaves.

The problem with ignoring note-off events is that some percussion instruments really need to have duration control by the keyboard, such as the TR-808 bass drum in GeneralUser, which has a different response whether the key is held down or not.  Also, we can't guarantee that something loaded into the percussion preset pool will use a GM/GS-compatible key mapping.

-~Chris

address@hidden wrote:
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



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