Re: [fluid-dev] Making MIDI player read from a buffer

[Jim Henry]

 Pedro,

It sounds like you are suggesting a feature that the Miditzer virtual 
organ uses. A number of years ago Sebastian Frippiat suggested extending 
FluidSynth so that the MIDI Player would pass the MIDI events to the 
caller rather than playing them. At the time there was no interest in 
his proposal. I think this was in part because he wanted just to use 
FluidSynth as a MIDI file reader and it was felt that was not within the 
scope of FluidSynth's purpose. He did post patches for doing this. We 
picked up those patches for the Miditzer and they are in the version of 
FluidSynth used with the Miditzer.

As Pedro suggests, the Miditzer takes MIDI input, including the input 
from the FluidSynth MIDI file reader, and vigorously manipulates the 
MIDI data before sending it to FluidSynth to be realized in order to 
create the organ performance paradigm which just doesn't fit within the 
standard MIDI specification. (By that I mean there is no way to fully 
encode the performance of an organ according to the MIDI specification.)

If there is now interest in extending the FluidSynth MIDI file player to 
send the MIDI messages to the caller for processing rather than playing 
them, I certainly support such an effort.

Jim Henry

On 10/18/2010 3:02 PM, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> Talking about my personal interests, MIDI applications often need to 
> parse
> MIDI files to manipulate MIDI events (sometimes interactively) before sending
> the events to the MIDI sequencer engine. For instance, to change the
> instrument maps of melodic and percussion instruments (MIDI mappers), or to
> manipulate controller events (i.e. MIDI volume), muting MIDI channels,
> transposing MIDI notes on melodic channels, synchronous display of SMF
> embedded song lyrics, and so on. All these functions belong not only to MIDI
> editors, but also to players like KMid (http://kmid2.sourceforge.net). This
> program has backends using the OS native sequencer services for Linux, Windows
> and MacOSX, and I would like to implement a pure FluidSynth backend. To do
> that, FluidSynth needs some new features for manipulating the playlists, but
> more important: a new mechanism in the MIDI player to route selected events to
> the client application, that may change them before playing. Opinions are
> welcome.
>
> Regards,
> Pedro