Re: MIDI files on IIgs?

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article nugundam@netcom.com (Joseph Lee) writes...

>James Poore (aw133@lafn.org) wrote:
>: The instrument file "midi.bnk" usually plays the midi files close to what
>: they should sound like.  Most midi files have drums in track 10.
>
>Where can this midi.bnk file be found?  I pretty much have the standard
>synthLab instruments, there's a lot of anime midis I can find to convert.

    On the Caltech FTP site, though an even better set of patches for
listening to MIDI files (IMHO) is "Europe.bnk", which came bundled with
a music sequence Ian Schmidt released about 1.5 years ago. I had tried
it with the end-credits theme for Ancient Land of Ys and I didn't even
need to assign a single instrument, it came out sounding great! Works
pretty well with lot of the Anime MIDI's I've tried too. :)

>My problem still with the MIDISynth toolset is picking 4 occillators to
>play one channel.  Sounds kinda nice but totally kills any ability to play
>more than 7 notes (or 7+ instruments) at the same time which most MIDIs do.
>2 per midi channel would've been quite nice.
>
>I'm guessing the reason was to be able to do special effects like pitch
>blend which requires 2 occillators per stereo channel.

    I would easily give up pitch blends (or slight decrease in sound
quality) in order to have twice the number of voices. I wonder if it's
not possible to modify MIDIsynth to operate this way, although then you
would probably have to redo all the instrument banks too. :/

    The lack of voices (and lack of instruments you can fit in at once,
or have to pick overall) is what made me give up of using the IIgs for
listening to MIDI files. More often than not, you just get a distorted
mess because too many voices are clipped. I still like to tinkering
with MIDIsynth, I just no longer use it when I want to listen to a
MIDI file I've just downloaded (the same way I don't use the GS to
display JPEG images anymore).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca