> On Feb 24, 2017, at 7:47 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>
> Am 24.02.2017 um 02:15 schrieb Joseph Austin:
>> This raises another question. I'm working with MIDI files,
>> and it's not clear how to encode UTF-8 text in MIDI.
>> There must be some convention, but I haven't found an official RP for it.
>
> Personally, I have no idea. Does Lily not do it right?
> Best, Simon
I don't have a program that displays MIDI files with lyrics, so I can't test
it.
Both Finale and MuseScore accept LilyPond generated midi files but ignore the
lyrics.
It appears that, when generating a MIDI file, LilyPond currently just puts UTF8
chars in the text fields as if they were ASCII.
According the base MIDI spec, this is illegal; only ASCII chars between 0 and
127 are allowed.
However, MIDI RP-17 and RP-26 introduce additional encodings for the <text>
portion of the lyric meta-event FF 05 <len> <text>. In particular, RP-26
specifies the "language" code {@LATIN} to include 8-bit chars > 127. It seems
no code for "UTF8" has been officially defined, but a reasonable proposal might
be language code: {@UTF8}.
It's my impression that the largest body of MIDI files with lyrics are
"Karaoke" files (extension .kar),
which may not be of interest to LilyPond.
I suppose that interest in using MIDI as a "score" language has waned in favor
of MusicXML.
So for LilyPond purposes, it would suffice to use a reversible encoding, that
is, LilyPond would accept any MIDI file text format that LilyPond generates.
The apparently existing UTF-8 default should work for that.
But if we are going to use a "private standard", we might as well imitate the
"official" standard and insert something like
FF 05 07 { @ U T F 8 }
And lobby AMEI/MMA to adopt an official UTF8 position.
Joe Austin
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