Re: [fluid-dev] MIDI mode

[josh]

Quoting David Henningsson <address@hidden>:
> address@hidden wrote:
> > Quoting David Henningsson <address@hidden>:
>
> > > If there is no difference; either just add GM (preferred), or add GS,
> > > XG and GM2 (to indicate future improvements). Does that make sense to
> > > you?
> > Its tempting to add all of them and the relevant SYSEX On/Off   
> > messages, just for the usefulness as an indicator.  So if the user   
> > notices it saying XG, they can be pretty sure things are going to   
> > be fairly broken, if its trying to use any of the extended features.
>
> Is the user going to notice that by an info message?

I suppose not, unless we enable it when synth.verbose is set to TRUE  
or something.  As it is now, it would be just if they checked the  
midi-mode parameter via the shell.

> > I think its kind of hack-ish to have a delay parameter, since   
> > choosing the proper value has some pitfalls.  It could still end up  
> >  cutting the sound short and then only for certain instruments in   
> > certain SoundFont files, leading to inconsistency between   
> > instruments and confusion as to what is wrong.
>
> If the attack is a little too long, the sound is normally not cut off
> but moving on to the release phase, so it would just have a somewhat
> lower volume, rather than sounding "cut off".


It still seems a bit weird to me to try and pick a minimum note  
duration, which will work well with most instruments, which could have  
different attack durations, etc.  It may be that it works fine in  
practice though.  I just don't like it.  If you have a percussion  
instrument that has a short release phase, you'll just end up with a  
8ms or 10ms percussion sound, so it will still get cut short and sound  
weird.  If a MIDI file is truly expecting note-offs to be ignored, it  
wont be getting that behavior.


> > I just realized that a per channel Volume Envelope Release offset   
> > generator could be set, which would extend the release stage of any  
> >  instruments on a particular channel.
>
> That would not help ticket #1 though, since we never get through the
> attack phase, so we start release from a volume level of zero = no
> sound.

True.  I hadn't thought of that.

> > > > I am also starting to like the note-off-percuss setting, for the   
> > > >  added flexibility.
> > >
> > > Good :-) Then will you add both synth.note-off-percuss and
> > > synth.midi-mode (if they aren't there already)?
> >
> > Yeah, I think I will add both of them.  One issue I can see though,  
> >  is that it might be nice to have the note-off-percuss setting be   
> > handled instead by a per channel ignore-noteoff setting.  That   
> > would be a lot more flexible, since you could then specify that   
> > behavior on any channel.  Maybe the MIDI router would be the best   
> > place for that.
>
> Perhaps, but MIDI files to not pass through the MIDI router currently.
> Should they do that?

Good question.  Seems like that could be useful.

> > Well it seems I kind of missed my deadline to get the MIDI mode   
> > stuff sorted out.  I should have that done within the next day or   
> > so though. I spent a lot of time working on the Windows build of   
> > FluidSynth.  Fixed a lot of bugs and got the TCP server working,   
> > more details in another email.
>
> That's well spent time as well :-)

Probably so :)

> // David

Josh