Hello Michael, So your thought is that reserving channel 10 will save user pain and cut down on communicating the "Why is my piano playing drum sounds?" questions.
I think logical instruments in general will bring out several new FAQs, like: Q:"Why is Rosegarden not honoring my controllers that I set on my keyboard?" A: Use fixed instruments if you want to continue to have realtime access to MIDI controllers? Q: "Why are my controllers for an instrument not being honored at measure x?" A: Most likely you are playing a very dense piece of music and there were no physical channels available to map the notes to so, we controllers from two or more sources are now getting mapped to the same physical channel. I could go in in this vein, the point is that there will definitely be a new crop of FAQs surrounding the issue and you are correct that the drum issue will be the most frequent and most obvious of the FAQ. The answer to this FAQ is simple (assuming instrument 10's fixed/logical state is selectable): Select "fixed" for Instrument 10. If we chose to provide "sane" defaults for the studio and on file load, users that run into this issue will most likely have chosen to select channel 10 as a logical instrument. So their own action will have created this situation. Before I go one, I guess I'll need to build this thing and see how the user is actually choosing between logical and fixed instruments (from a GUI perspective). I'll see if I can get it up and going tomorrow. Sincerely, Julie S. --- On Sun, 1/29/12, D. Michael McIntyre <[email protected]> wrote: > From: D. Michael McIntyre <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Logical instruments save and restore fixed > channels now > To: [email protected] > Date: Sunday, January 29, 2012, 6:56 PM > On Sunday, January 29, 2012, Julie S > wrote: > > > What I'm suggesting is that the final version of this > software should not > > have a hard coded channel 10 exclusion. I'm > suggesting that the default > > studio have channel 10 marked as a fixed channel. > > Yes, I understand what you're suggesting. > > > I don't see a real downside to his approach and the up > side is that all 16 > > channels are available as logical channels and we don't > have to treat > > channel 10 as special. > > The downside is that on some hardware, channel 10 *is* > special. Let it float, > Tom's magic needs a channel, it picks up channel 10 to > allocate to some > alternate voice on some piano part, and now your piano notes > are playing as > drums. Why? Because this synth *always* plays > drums on channel 10. > > The way to tell Rosegarden what a particular piece of > hardware can and cannot > do is through the device definition. If you don't > provide this information > there, then you're leaving everything else up to loose ends > and workarounds. > There isn't any way to specify this information in the > device definition. The > right way to do this would require adding new fields to say > whether percussion > can be toggled per channel, and how, and providing a > mechanism for Rosegarden > to do that when it wants to allocate a channel for one > purpose or the other. > > Or we could just reserve channel 10, because it might be > reserved on the > hardware, and save the headaches. Without new data, we > can't know whether it > is or not, so it's safer to assume that it is. > > I think expanding the device definitions is the best > approach, but I also > think it's waaaaaaaay more trouble than it could possibly be > worth. My vote > is to just reserve channel 10, and let the handful of people > who have > exceptionally nice MIDI hardware deal with it, rather than > creating new > problems for all the people who have a cheap keyboard from > Walmart. There are > a lot more of the latter than the former using Rosegarden. > > That's my vote, but this isn't a pronouncement. I > don't really care that much > either way, I'm just trying to get you to see my perspective > on what a big > fuster cluck of user whining this has the potential to > be. Why write FAQs and > tutorials when we can just avoid creating problems in the > first place? > Everybody up to now is used to Rosegarden reserving channel > 10 anyway. > -- > D. Michael McIntyre > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Try before you buy = See our experts in action! > The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft > developers > is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, > CSS3, MVC3, > Metro Style Apps, more. 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