VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Release candidate (was Beta)

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Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
coolsoft wrote:
That said... I'd like to check that MIDI file on my side ;)

The sample MIDI file you've sent me uses NOTE_OFF (MIDI message 0x80), which I'd have bet being the most correct (and used) one instead of the equivalent NOTE_ON (0x90)+velocity=0.
Well, there was a bug in NOTE_OFF detection that worked correctly only on channel 1; NOTE_ON+vel=0 was instead detected correctly for all channels.
Since that bug was there from... VMS 1.x era, now I know that most of the MIDI files use NOTE_ON+vel=0 to end a note ;)

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
sometimes the current level indicator doesn't reach the red leds even when it has peaked

That's because the level indicator does not show the instant volume but a moving average between the latest 2 values; that was added to make it more "analog", otherwise it will flash like crazy between high and low values.
I've thought a lot about it in the past and this is the best so far.

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
A peak indicator/warning for the mixer, currently it's a bit hard to tell if the midi it's clipping or not

I've added an "experimental" implementation of this feature. Please note that it uses the instant volume value (higher than 95%) and not the moving average one (see above).
So it should give a good indication of clipping state.

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
the icons of the mixer's contextual menu are slightly corrupted until/unless you put the mouse over them

I'm not able to reproduce it on my side.
Have you tried raising/lowering resolution and/or color depth?

Posts: 96
Joined: 14 Ott 2016 - 03:20
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
coolsoft wrote:
The sample MIDI file you've sent me uses NOTE_OFF (MIDI message 0x80), which I'd have bet being the most correct (and used) one instead of the equivalent NOTE_ON (0x90)+velocity=0.
Well, there was a bug in NOTE_OFF detection that worked correctly only on channel 1; NOTE_ON+vel=0 was instead detected correctly for all channels.
Since that bug was there from... VMS 1.x era, now I know that most of the MIDI files use NOTE_ON+vel=0 to end a note ;)

It's really interesting that there's two ways to stop a note, that explains the misterious "off velocity", a long time ago when I first saw this cc I though it was used to control how fast the volume would drop after the note ended or something like that, then later I did figure out it was just for ending notes, I didn't know there was another way to stop a note, the sample I sent have all "off velocity"set at 64 exactly when every note ends while in the other sample it was set at 1 but still were at the end of every single note

coolsoft wrote:
That's because the level indicator does not show the instant volume but a moving average between the latest 2 values; that was added to make it more "analog", otherwise it will flash like crazy between high and low values.
I've thought a lot about it in the past and this is the best so far.

I've added an "experimental" implementation of this feature. Please note that it uses the instant volume value (higher than 95%) and not the moving average one (see above).
So it should give a good indication of clipping state.

Yeah, because of the not-instant way the level indicator implemented it can't really work as a peak warning, the way you are implementing the peak indicator should work perfectly

coolsoft wrote:
I'm not able to reproduce it on my side.
Have you tried raising/lowering resolution and/or color depth?

I've just tried and changing the resolution and it doesn't change anything, I can't really change color depth in windows 10 afaik, even in the menu "showing all modes" they are all 32 bit

I have a AMD R9 270 by the way, maybe it's a problem with amd cards? or maybe with this specific model/series

This glitch happens everytime I open the contextual menu of the mixer, it's not just sometimes or once in a while so it's very consistent, It also happens on the midi converter's midi mixer as you can see:

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
This glitch happens everytime I open the contextual menu of the mixer, it's not just sometimes or once in a while so it's very consistent, It also happens on the midi converter's midi mixer as you can see

Of course, all the mixers share the same resources.
Looking for a fix I've found this Microsoft forum thread where another developer has the same issue: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c927ac49-45b7-452c-b740-f...
Sadly nobody at MS helped him; the only althernative given was to switch to owner-drawn menus, which is a huge lot of work for such a simple task as showing an icon on a menu...
I've actualy slightly changed the icons, please check them out in beta 3.

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta

Version 2.5.0-beta3 released, see first post for further details.

Posts: 96
Joined: 14 Ott 2016 - 03:20
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
coolsoft wrote:
Of course, all the mixers share the same resources.
Looking for a fix I've found this Microsoft forum thread where another developer has the same issue: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c927ac49-45b7-452c-b740-f...
Sadly nobody at MS helped him; the only althernative given was to switch to owner-drawn menus, which is a huge lot of work for such a simple task as showing an icon on a menu...
I've actualy slightly changed the icons, please check them out in beta 3.

Nice job, most of the icon corruption it's gone:

I doesn't happen anymore on "Load mixer state..." Icon, "Save mixer state..." Icon and the "Reset (R)" Icon (this one was specially bad)

But it still happens on the "Copy state from" (I guess this is the most noticeable corruption) icon and on the "Open Windows audio mixer..." icon (very slight corruption) and on the newly added icon on "About VirtualMIDISynth..." (very slight corruption), all the other new icons don't seem to have any corruption

I like the remade icons, they look much better than the old ones and that the mixer window have a different icon

If the key to stop the corruption is to change the icons then I suggest a change to the "Copy state from", If I had to think of a icon desing for copying I would go for something well known like this:

If you want to get creative, instead of being 2 documents it would be 2 mixers, something like this icon I just made:

And about the mixer, it feels much more lively with the channel leds working properly in all the midis, back to when it didn't work properly I think I noticed something was wrong while playing with the solo function because when trying to solo a channel it was a nightmare to know which channel I wanted to solo because all channels except for 1 kept the led on

but now with all of them working + knowing the name of the instruments you don't even need to mute/solo channels to know which one you are looking for, I love it

As for the peak indicator it looks like it's working pretty well, so well it's saying most of my midis are too loud at max volume thanks to the soundfonts with too much boosted volume :p

Talking about soundfonts settings, there's a thing that bothers me about saving/loading soundfont configuration files, they save the % of volume but when loading it all the percentages are at default volume (at 100%), this gotta be a bug

But the bug only happens if you just installed VMS and said yes to erase settings then no matter how many times you try to load the file or close and open VMS, it will always load all sounfonts with 100% volume

Another small thing that bothered me when it changed but I've gotten used to, a while ago in some version the soundfont load order changed,

the text says it loads from top to bottom and that the latest it's the first it loads, but it actually loads from bottom to top and the latest is still the first it loads

Now I've gotten used to the second way so I don't mind if you don't change anything (well, except for a correction for the text, for people that don't know this), but if you want to you could add a way to change between the 2 load order (either from top to bottom or from bottom to top) maybe with a check box close to the text that explains the soundfont order

And for last, a interesting bug with hitboxes that have been in there/I've known since the introduction of VMS 2.0, it's not very important nor annoying but I will show you anyways (I think this is the last bug I currently know), you decide if you want to fix it:

If the window of the configuration it's not big enough to completely see the last sounfont and you try to activate the led of the last soundfont you can (not completely) see of the list of soundfonts, it will activate the sounfont under instead:

imo the way this bug is most annoying is when the window is small

Here's a demostration:

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
If the window of the configuration it's not big enough to completely see the last sounfont and you try to activate the led of the last soundfont you can (not completely) see of the list of soundfonts, it will activate the sounfont under instead

Thanks, never noticed it ;)
It was due to ListBox intercepting the MouseUp event instead of MouseDown. If you click on a partially visible ListBox item (and keep the mouse button pressed) you'll see that the clicked item is automatically scrolled into view; now, if you release the button the SoundfontList detects this event but the item under mouse pointer has changed, so the wrong LED is toggled.
Fixed it, thanks...

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
Talking about soundfonts settings, there's a thing that bothers me about saving/loading soundfont configuration files, they save the % of volume but when loading it all the percentages are at default volume (at 100%), this gotta be a bug

But the bug only happens if you just installed VMS and said yes to erase settings then no matter how many times you try to load the file or close and open VMS, it will always load all sounfonts with 100% volume

It does not import all "numeric" soundfont data, including bank/preset setting ;)
Fixed, thanks ;)

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
like the remade icons, they look much better than the old ones and that the mixer window have a different icon

Current icon rendering is really a nightmare, I don't like to keep it up in the future.
Additionally it doesn't work at all on WindowsXP (yes, I know it's a legacy product, but I still need to support it) and on Vista/7 there's a lot of garbage and misalignment.

I'm trying to switch to fully ownerdrawn menus, but it's a huge lot of work.
I did not think it was so hard to accomplish such a simple task as adding menu icons on Windows...

Posts: 96
Joined: 14 Ott 2016 - 03:20
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
coolsoft wrote:
It does not import all "numeric" soundfont data, including bank/preset setting ;)
Fixed, thanks ;)

Glad that's fixed, it was annoying as hell to lose the volume configuration of every single soundfont I have (+25 soundfonts that are GM Compliant or more and ~25 non GM ones), before writing my previous post I though the saving of these settings wasn't a feature until I opened the file it saves with a text editor, just to see that the values were saved

coolsoft wrote:
Current icon rendering is really a nightmare, I don't like to keep it up in the future.
Additionally it doesn't work at all on WindowsXP (yes, I know it's a legacy product, but I still need to support it) and on Vista/7 there's a lot of garbage and misalignment.

I'm trying to switch to fully ownerdrawn menus, but it's a huge lot of work.
I did not think it was so hard to accomplish such a simple task as adding menu icons on Windows...

Well, icons aren't a essencial thing, they are just a extra/bonus, windows xp was great but it's really outdated (my 2nd HDD still have xp installed but I almost never use it), graphically wise for example, most programs look worse on xp because it's old enough it doesn't support the new features new os use and because it's using old assets, same thing with games, games that have DX11 won't be able to use DX11 graphical features in xp because xp only uses DX9, and the user can't complain because it his own fault for using a almost 17 year old OS

If you feel like the icons are too much work then you don't have to do them if you think it's not worth it, they are not necessary after all

And 2 things about the forum editor, the image resize doesn't work (on firefox at least) on my last post I made the big image smaller and that icon I made twice the size but both got published at the normal size, also I can't find the edit post button (Yes, I have thread permission to edit, I though the button was next to the quote button)

Here's a screenshot of the whole page, I'm not sure I'm just not seeing it or it's simply not there: https://imgur.com/a/SFbM0df

Don't worry in case it's a bug you can't fix, because if that's the case next time I'll keep in mind that I can't edit or resize pictures

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta
Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
Well, icons aren't a essencial thing, they are just a extra/bonus, windows xp was great but it's really outdated

You're right, but I'd like to have a solution that works on all systems without "special treatment" added for some of them.
Anyway it actually works perfectly and there's no need for 32bpp icons (with alpha channel) anymore; this was the nightmare I refereed to.

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
And 2 things about the forum editor, the image resize doesn't work (on firefox at least) on my last post I made the big image smaller and that icon I made twice the size but both got published at the normal size

Forum editor is the well-known CKEditor, integrated to Drupal website by its own module.
Will have a look at why resize doesn't work, but can't promise anything.

Anonimo_LLopi wrote:
also I can't find the edit post button (Yes, I have thread permission to edit, I though the button was next to the quote button)

Forum is a custom Drupal module I wrote by myself (I was not satisfied of any other available Drupal forum module).
Post editing is enabled only on last own post (you can't edit a post if someone replied to it) and only within 30 minutes from original posting.
When I set that limit I thought 30min was a good choice and left enought time to post, edit, repost and eventually edit again.
I'm open to suggestions...
PS: we're going OT, let's continue the discussion (if needed) on the new "General discussion" forum.

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta4

Beta4 released, only bug fixes in it (see first post).

Posts: 96
Joined: 14 Ott 2016 - 03:20
Re: VirtualMIDISynth 2.5.0 - Beta4
coolsoft wrote:

Beta4 released, only bug fixes in it (see first post).

Ok, all icons now work perfectly and don't have any glitches, nice job

Now the export/import does save configuration, but I've discovered 2 bugs related with the export/import function (1 accidentally and the other was simply very noticeable)

1st: If you try to import a configuration that doesn't exist by manualy putting a name that doesn't exists it just imports nothing and erases all your current configuration, this might not necesarily be a bug but I think the program shouldn't let you import nothing, I've discovered this because I though I was writing a name for the file for the export function and I didn't know I was importing instead:

2nd: If the soundfont chain it's empty and you import a file the "remove soundfont", "edit soundfont settings", "move up", "move down" buttons won't work until you close and reopen the config window:

Just after I post this I'm going to try and see if I can edit this message, if I can't then this is the only mensage you will see about this

Edit: yes, I can

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