MIDI 2 support and bank selection

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Posts: 29
Joined: 26 Giu 2015 - 03:15
MIDI 2 support and bank selection

It would be nice if VMS could support the entire MIDI 2 patch repertoire via the standard MIDI 2 bank selection protocol (and of course there would need to be a SoundFont that provided that repertoire of patches).

Best regards,

Doug

Posts: 129
Joined: 25 Set 2013 - 16:38
Re: MIDI 2 support and bank selection

I suspect by MIDI 2 you mean the GM2 (General MIDI Level 2) standard. The underlying library behind VMS (Bassmidi) has limited support of GM2. Namely if you send a GM2 System On SysEx message to Bassmidi/VMS you can reach the Drums sets of your soundfont at the GM2 compatible drum bank (bank MSB 120). Unfortunately SF2 soundfont files themselves are the main problem. According to specification SF2 supports only 127 (+1 drum ) banks and only 1 bank 'dimension' that is usually addressable by Bank MSB controller messages. Contrary GM2 requires 2 bank dimensions (Bank MSB + LSB addressing, 16384 possible patches). If you want to set a variation tone in GM2 you have to set Bank MSB to 121 and Bank LSB to your variation bank and then set the required program/preset number. But since there is only 1 bank dimension in SF2 you can only use either Bank MSB or BANK LSB for addressing (in VMS you can only use the Bassmidi default Bank MSB addressing).

But you can try to convince Ian (the creator of Bassimidi) at www.un4seen.com forum to make a more GM2 compatible default SF2 mapping in case when GM2 system is set (besides drums mapped to Bank MSB 120, also  map the melodic presets to Bank MSB 121 and make the variation banks LSB selectable).

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: MIDI 2 support and bank selection

@falcosoft: thanks again for your technical MIDI answer. I can't go so deep in MIDI details ;-)

@Doug Kerr: if you start a thread on un4seen forum, feel free to backlink the 2 threads so we could join there and keep updated.