Re: midi articulation

[Daniel Birns]

So my question is: When you use Aria Maestosa, do you have the problem I 
outlined? As far as QSynth and FluidSynth — I was able to use brew to install 
QSynth, but not the other, and the build is kinda ridiculous for most people. 
I’m a developer and the instructions are sketchy to me, at least on mac.

The basic problem is that once you make edits in the score, you must redo all 
the work you’ve done fine-tuning the sound in the midi player. You don’t have 
the problem with Aria Maestosa?

And without fine-tuning, my impression is that midi usually sounds pretty 
awful. 

My perspective is as a Sibelius user. Hearing what you’ve written has no 
equivalent in lilypond/midi players.

When I first used Sibelius, I didn’t understand why they cared so much about 
midi results. But I’ve been able to get some quite listenable results with 
Sibelius. Here’s an example: 
https://soundcloud.com/redwood54/brandenburg-2-andante 
<https://soundcloud.com/redwood54/brandenburg-2-andante>

In order to anything like this with lilypond, you’d have to do a great deal of 
work, which you would not to lose, in the midi editor. And once you generate 
new midi files, you lose everything.

-d

> On Mar 25, 2016, at 10:45 AM, Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 3/25/16 10:31 AM, "Daniel Birns" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> PDF viewers is a different class of problem.
>> 
>> 
>> I¹ll be concrete.
>> 
>> 
>> 1) I¹m on a mac, and have 3 midi players available to me: Quicktime
>> (free), Garage Band(free), Sibelius. Of course, Sibelius is a bad
>> example, because it¹s a direct competitor with lilypond, but I have it.
> 
> Quicktime and Garage Band are free as in beer, but they are still
> proprietary, which means you can't alter or improve them.
> 
> It seems to me that rather than reinvent the wheel, you should be looking
> at free software, rather than proprietary software. It will either work
> well, or it will need some improvement.  And you could make the
> improvements in much less time than you can code from scratch.
> 
> I'm on a mac as well, and I have Aria Maestosa as a free option.
> 
>  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ariamaestosa
> 
> 
> It seems to work well to me (but I don't have your midi file to see how
> bad it sounds).  I'm just testing some midi files from some LilyPond
> projects of mine.
> 
> 
> I also have timidity++, but I need to build that from source, so it may be
> beyond the ability of the typical user.
> 
> Many people in the Linux music world seem to use Timidity++ or FluidSynth.
> Here's an ubuntu page that describes how to do it:
> 
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Midi/SoftwareSynthesisHowTo
> 
> 
> The Frescobaldi manual recommends using Qsynth (which is a GUI to
> FluidSynth), but I haven't been able to get that to work yet (I haven't
> spent significant time trying, though).
> 
> It seems to me that starting with these tools, and making whatever
> improvements you desire, and teaching LilyPond users how to use them, is a
> more practical way of getting great MIDI output than writing your own MIDI
> synthesizer.
> 
> But if you disagree, that's fine.  I don't want to throw any hurdles in
> your way.  I'm just hoping to help.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Carl
> 
> 
> 
>