[LAU] midi velocity

[Brent Busby]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Asa Marco wrote:

> Hi, I once had the same problem with a sampled piano, So I started 
> playing with qmidicurves http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmidicurves/. 
> There are probably other ways to do it but this is pretty 
> straightforward.

On the suggestion of some others on the list, I checked the velocity 
output of my Yamaha SY99 against my Ensoniq ESQ-1...  (There were some 
posts awhile back saying it might be a Yamaha thing to send weak 
velocity data).  Well, it's true, in fact, they seem to be opposites! 
While the SY99 seems to never send quite high enough velocities to 
FluidSynth for what most soundfonts seem to be expecting (even on the 
SY99's most compensated action setting), the ESQ-1 plays everything too 
loud, even on its softest action setting.  So there does seem to be a 
big difference in the way different keyboards scale these things.  And 
oddly I never noticed this in all the years I've been sequencing in a 
pure physical gear environment -- if you want problems you've never had 
before, use a computer....

So, I took your advice and installed QmidiCurves, and now I can have 
whatever velocity curve I want.  The author seems to have created the 
Makefiles with a lot of Debian/Ubuntu assumptions though, so for anyone 
wanting to compile on Gentoo:

- if not already installed, emerge x11-libs/qwt:5 (the 5.x version)
   from Portage which is needed as a dependency

- download and extract...

- in QMIDICurves.pro, change LIBPATH to /usr/lib
   and change LIBS to -lqwt (not -lqwt-qt4)
   and add this line:  INCLUDEPATH += /usr/include/qwt

- qmake -recursive CONFIG+=debug_and_release QMIDICurves.pro

- fgrep -lr 'qwt-qt4/' | xargs sed -i 's|qwt-qt4/|qwt5/|g'

- lrelease lang-en.ts lang-fr.ts
   (strangely, the Makefile doesn't do this itself)

- 'make release'

This will produce a 'QMIDICurves' binary that's ready to go.  There is 
no Makefile driven 'make install' that actually does anything, so just 
put it in your /usr/local/bin and it works.  It will create an Alsa Midi 
input and output visible in your connection manager.

I should probably make an ebuild for this sometime Real Soon Now...

Also, the unlabeled icons in the upper right are:
move point, create point, delete point (not mentioned in the docs)

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky