[LAU] Whysynth and MIDI channels

Nick Copeland nickycopeland at hotmail.com
Wed May 30 11:43:57 EDT 2007


Hi All,

So, lets see, we are going to have 16 midi channels but people have to 
select them from 0 to 15? How about sampling rates - if I want 44100 samples 
per second am I going to have to give the value of 44099 to cater for the 
zeroth sample? How about when I select "-interleave 4" channels of sound; is 
that quadraphonic or 5 channel surroundsound?

How about the "10 items or less queue" at the supermarket? People understand 
this, however if you really want to count from zero then you could try and 
justify being in the queue with 11 items and get into one massive argument 
with the person behind you.

The honest truth is who really gives a fig about the MIDI specification? It 
has 16 channels, and in that supermarket queue they are numbers channels 1 
to channels 16. Their is absolutely no consistency in an application that 
demands some parameters as cardinal and demands other parameters as ordinal 
values.

Just out of interest, on a related topic, the issue here is one of 
understanding the specifics of each application/softsynth and the fact that 
some use different numbering, and also regarding the overall usability of 
the different Unix versionn. I would say that for people who get into using 
the apps then the channel numbering is not important - they will find the 
differences. For people, on the other hand, who just want to try the synths 
as easily as possible then selecting channels is a great pain in the butt, 
so, MIDI addressed this with the OMNI mode where your synth, unless 
otherwise specified, should ignore the MIDI channel and respond to 
everything, and even specified that this be the default mode of operation 
unless otherwise selected. Perhaps it would be wise to ask the developers of 
these synths to be in OMNI mode unless a midi channel is specified, and in 
the latter case the user should have a better idea of what is going on.

The reason I ask regards Bristol, it does not operate in OMNI mode but I 
have debated whether to implement it (it has always numbers MIDI channels 
from '1' since nothing else really makes much sense). That kind of depends 
on requirements, however it also occured to me that unless otherwise 
specified then the ALSA seq library should also default to 'OMNI' mode. This 
follows a recent question posted here as to why somebodies USB keyboard 
would not connect per default to their soft synths, leaving this new user to 
dig around to find something called aconnect that accepted some wierd and 
rather unintelligible numbers just to test a couple of applications with 
their master keyboard.

If all the synths acted in OMNI mode and the ALSA sequencer library (and 
other other MIDI libraries) acted in OMNI (everything source connected to 
every sink, unless otherwise specified) then it would be an easier system 
for a new user, and would not be any more difficult for an experienced user. 
Unix historically does nothing unless you

b) tell it to
a) know how to tell

That is kind of broken unless you

2) know how to fix it
1) like things being difficult to start with

It shouldn't be so difficult.

Also, the remark about hardware using channel number 1 is actually correct: 
their reference here was to hard synths rather than soft synths. The 
hardware in this case is not the chip set or the protocol specification but 
rather the synths that implement MIDI allowed the player to select channels 
numbered from 1. Once again, who cares a fig about what the protocol 
specifies, or even what the hardware does  - if I have 16 channels then as a 
user I expect them to be numbered up to 16. If people want anything else 
then there should be another option called

-midichannelforpedants

Regards,
N.


>From: Dave Phillips <dlphillips at woh.rr.com>
>Reply-To: A list for linux audio users 
><linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org>
>To: A list for linux audio users <linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org>
>Subject: Re: [LAU] Whysynth and MIDI channels
>Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 10:01:31 -0400
>
>Paul Coccoli wrote:
>
>>On 5/29/07, Sean Bolton <musound at jps.net> wrote:
>>
>>>With ghostess, use the '-chan' command line option, e.g.
>>>'ghostess -chan 3 whysynth.so'.  Note that ghostess numbers
>>>its channels starting from 0, so that example would cause it
>>>to listen on what most people call channel 4.... ;-)
>>
>>
>>Now doesn't that sound silly when you read it out loud?  I don't
>>understand why so many programmers insist on using 0-15 for MIDI
>>channels when most hardware uses 1-16 (correct me if I'm wrong).
>
>Patch number representation ought to be selectable. Older MIDI gear might 
>use one of various numbering schemes, it's useful to have the software 
>numbering match the hardware.
>
>Best,
>
>dp
>
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>Linux-audio-user mailing list
>Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
>http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user

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