[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
That means means V:2 is to be played by General Midi program 46 (Orchestral Harp)Hi all, a couple of things that I am trying to get nailed down:1. Could somebody explain to me what MIDI thing I'm supposed to do when I see this: V:2 bass program 1 46
(That came from Jack Campin's CD which he graciously sent me, iabc can play 'David Hume's Lament', but I still can't change voices).
So Jack includes BarFly specific abc on his CD? Naughty, Jack! ;-)
In most cases it doesn't matter much, but it may be a safe precaution to separate different instruments by both channel and track. I believe there are some midi players that treat certain midi events (i.e. pitch bend) as "global" - applying to all channels on a single track, and there certainly are midi equipment that doesn't understand tracks at all.My second question is more general: what is the advantage of using MIDI tracks over just one track but multiple voices? I have it implemented as one track for now, but I notice that most MIDI files seem to have multiple tracks, and I'm not sure what that's supposed to accomplish.
The channels were a part of the original midi specs. Way back in '82 (i think it was) they couldn't imagine that anybody would ever need to run more than 16 separate midi voices simultaneously. Tracks was added later (as a rather crude hack) when this proved to be insufficient.
When I'm working with midi, I always find it useful to imagine good old-fashioned analogue hardware even if I'm dealing with software synthesizers. Think of the channels as voices on a single synth/module and the tracks as separate instruments in a midi setup.
Frank Nordberg
http://www.musicaviva
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