Aaron Sherber wrote:
At 07:26 AM 08/01/2005, dhbailey wrote:
>And for someone using an external playback device with 16 channels? How
>will having channels 1-8 and 17-24 be responded to on a device which
>only recognizes 1-16?
David, take a look at some of my other responses to Darcy. A GPO slot is
not the same thing as a MIDI channel, even though the easiest way to set
things up may be to have the two be equivalent. It's easy to use MIDI
1-16 and map them to GPO slots 1-8 and 17-24 so that things will
playback correctly. In fact, you have to do something like this with
percussion, which require MIDI 10.
Thanks for persisting with me, Aaron.
I just spent a very frustrating half-hour before I realized that the
place to change channels isn't the instrument list but is the
keyboard-like interface of the VST setup (get to the place where you can
initiate however many instances of GPO you want and then click the EDIT
button.) There's a little-tiny midi-port with a channel number next to
it, just to the right of the LOAD button, just below the instrument's
patch name and the CPU Usage slot. Click on that channel number next to
the midi-port icon (why clicking the icon does nothing is beyond me) and
you get a list of channels.
Okay, I now see that.
However, when I edit that, a comparable edit is not made in the
Instrument List window, so if I am configuring a file to play through an
external device I need to edit that as well. And the edit there won't
have any affect on the channel I edit in the GPO dialog.
But if I edit the instrument playback list, even if I am using GPO, and
so assign a channel that doesn't have a patch loaded, there will be no
sound.
So it seems that Instrument list edits can affect GPO playback, but GPO
edits don't always affect Instrument List data.
Interestingly enough, changing the setting to be OMNI, and GPO responds
to any channel edits I make in Instrument List. However, if you load
two different patches and assign them both to OMNI, you get one sound or
the other for all your staves (I added a second staff and tried it), so
you're stuck with assigning specific channels to the GPO sounds.
I don't think anybody could explain this behavior, not even Darcy.
In any event, now, Aaron, I do see your point and can understand how a
person can maintain a single file for any sort of playback, unless your
score utilizes more than 16 channels and you want to make it playable on
a standard 16-channel midi playback device, but then that's been true
ever since MakeMusic expanded midi capability to more than 16 channels
and there's never been a way around that.
The more I dig to find out what it is people are trying to say to me,
the more I learn about this GPO stuff. But I'm not sure anybody could
make it easy, because it's only by asking the questions which have us
baffled or stonewalled that some of us are perservering through the
answers to find some tiny spark of light.
I'm sure it'll come, a much more fluid, fluent understanding, but I'm
not sure at what price, nor at what a return on investment. I still
find the soundfont playback to be perfectly fine for playback and for demos.
After all, we've been reminded that even GPO has its limitations and
will sound synthetic. As long as my clients can recognize the
instruments as being what they're supposed to be (e.g. have a violin
sound like a violin and not a gameboy sqwauk as used to happen with the
old FMsynth soundcards), they'll be happy.
Especially since without a larger outlay for samples (full GPO,
Jazz/BigBand set) and in hardware (I'm already noticing hiccups with my
1.8GHz P4 with 1GB of ram, if anything is running in the background), we
won't ever be able to fully realize the potential of this stuff.
So my public thanks to Tyler and Darcy and Aaron and the others who have
persisted against my granite-brained obstinance -- I can see the
potential. I can't realize it yet, but I know it's there.
Now let me see, how can I overbill my clients that extra $400 so I can
buy the full GPO and the Jazz/BigBand set when it's released, and then
there's that extra money for a larger hard drive to hold the samples and
more ram so they can be held in memory when needed, and, oh, yes, the
faster processor which will necessitate a new motherboard. By my
calculations, to get the full potential out of this $100 upgrade, it
should only cost me somewhere around $800 or more. Yeah, I can pad my
billing that much, no problem! Maybe even convince my bank that a
capital improvement loan for my business would be worthwhile. :-)
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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