Re: [fluid-dev] improving musical timekeeping

[address@hidden]

Thank you for your time. I've written my comments inline.

2020.02.08. 15:41 keltezéssel, Tom M. írta:
> Here are some thoughts of a software engineer. Not sure what a musician
> would say.
>
> First of all, you are right. A "meaningfully long" attack phase will
> "delay" note on and thus shorten it. My question: what would be
> the use-case of such a "meaningfully long" attack? The only use-case I
> can think of is to play a crescendo. And for this, one should use the
> Expression CC instead.
I am referring to attacks on the order of 10 ms to a few hundred ms 
(milliseconds) - be it the short attack of a piano note or a drum hit, 
or longer attacks of woodwind instruments, strings, choirs, etc.
> Why samplers/synthesizers don't compensate for that? I think because
> it doesn't work for real-time performance. One would need to delay all
> notes by the length of the attack phase. But what if the musician
> suddenly switches to another instrument which has an even longer
> attack?
My suggested use case was for scored (non-interactive, known-in-advance) 
music - MIDI playback if you will. Obviously in an interactive scenario 
(someone playing a keyboard real-time) this function could not work. But 
in the age of DAWs and music composition software (I'm coming from 
MuseScore) playback of scored music is a common use-case, which makes me 
think it might be worth adding this functionality to the underlying 
synthesizer.
>   Even worse: what if the musician uses a custom CC that extends
> the attack phase even more? The only way to correct this would be to
> figure out the longest attack phase that can ever be produced and
> delay all notes and all sound accordingly. But most musicians use
> monitors. They want to hear what they play, when they play it. I think
> they would be very confused if what they're playing is delayed by a
> few seconds.
Let's keep the two use cases separate. For interactive playback, this 
could not work well, I agree. But for rendering scored music (which is 
feel is a quite common use case), it would.
> It is (a) well known (problem), that MIDI sheets only work well with
> the soundbank they have been designed for.
I acknowledge this is the status quo (the situation currently). But are 
we also saying we are not interested in pushing the boundaries of 
technology to improve the situation? Are we going to be frozen into 
SoundFont 2.04 forever?
>   This is due to various
> degrees of freedom a soundbank provides (volume, ADSR env, cut-off
> filters, custom CC automation). So, if you really have instruments
> with "meaningfully long" attacks, I'm afraid you're required to adjust
> your MIDI sheet(s) manually.
So if I am scoring orchestral/choir music, and would like to play it 
back with reasonable musical timekeeping, you are sentencing me to 
eternal toiling with manually adjusting note times, just to arrive at a 
baseline that would seem to me to be quite possible to get done 
automatically, given there is infrastructure developed to support this. 
I am not familiar with these customization possibilities you mention - 
haven't read the SoundFont spefication yet -, but my use case would be 
acoustic/orchestral instrument sounds, where little if any artificial 
manipulation would be intended to be added by the composer. Everything 
should sound as natural as possible instead.

- HuBandiT