>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
It means display the music on a bass clef, with the note D, on the middle line, and play it using bank number one, voice number 46. Midi voices are arranged in banks of 128. On all modern synths bank number one holds the General Midi set, so program 1 46 means Orchestral Harp. It says nothing about what track to use, that's left up to the program. Confusingly, Quicktime (which BarFly uses to play Midi) dispenses entirely with banks, and just numbers the instruments continuously, so you may see program 1 166 (SynthBass101, the first instrument in the Roland GS set). Properly, this should have been specified as program 2 39 (39 = 166 modulo 127) but nobody bothers, unless they are using an external synth. The instruments above 127 aren't reproducible across platforms anyway. >(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). The CD also contains Midi files for each tune, so if in doubt you can look at them with a Midi editor to see what was intended. >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. It's pretty much irrelevant I think. Multiple tracks mean that you can send the different tracks to different synths if you have a multi-synth set up. If you're playing the midi through a sound card it will make no difference. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
