Small usability tweaks

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Posts: 2
Joined: 16 Ott 2016 - 05:39
Small usability tweaks

First of all, thank you for making VirtualMidiSynth, it's made retro gaming and midi playback as enjoyable as it ever was.

I have some small suggestions that may be useful to people who are trying to fine tune their preferred instruments:

  1. The mixer may benefit from displaying the Bank/Patch number in addition to the instrument name (Especially when no instrument name is provided, for some reason) (Attached image shows active drum track with no name, probably a SoundFont issue, but it would be useful to know which drum patch it was using)
  2. Support for setting an entire bank replacement rather than a single bank/patch, especially in the drum track range (I am unsure how this works but currently we cannot set drum replacements)

Also this is a minor question, have you ever considered open-sourcing VMS on Github or somewhere?

Thank you for your time!

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Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: Small usability tweaks

1)
VMS selects bank/preset when the soundfont is loaded and assigned to the MIDI stream, but that info is done on the whole SF2 file, not at channel level.
To do that I should intercept each incoming MIDI patch-change message and display it accordingly instead of Program name (if missing)... do you mean that?

2)
This is the BASS function called by VMS when an SF2 soundfont is loaded:
http://www.un4seen.com/doc/#bassmidi/BASS_MIDI_FontLoad.html

and parameters in that function are the same that you see in Soundfont editor configuration window in VMS.

Using BASS documentation you should understand what those parameters mean (at least more than me ;)).
I'm much more a developer than a MIDI SoundFonts expert, so I hardly understand what you mean with "we cannot set drum replacements", sorry.

You should, at first, check if this configuration is already possible in BASS using XMPlay (https://support.xmplay.com, a portable player written by the same author as BASS) + its MIDI plugin.
Configure XMPlay MIDI to load your soundfont and replace the patches you want.
If you're able to reach the configuration you like, post here a screenshot of how you configured XMPlay MIDI plugin.
If not, try to reprhrase this question in "musical language" and I'll post a technical question on BASS forum and ask for help...

About opensourcing VMS: sorry, no, there's actually no plan to do so ;)

Posts: 2
Joined: 16 Ott 2016 - 05:39
Re: Small usability tweaks

Hi, thank you for responding! Attached are screen captures of a configuration in XMPlay where the topmost font is configured to only replace "d000" (drum bank 0?, appears to be equal to bank 128), preset 000 (the Standard drum kit)

Your guess is as good as mine as to where the locations of d001 and up are, but the BASSMIDI documentation says bank 128 (which cannot currently be selected in VMS) contains the drum presets. [1] [2] I think a bit of further experimentation is needed.

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