Re: midi articulation

[Daniel Birns]

PDF viewers is a different class of problem.

I’ll be concrete.

1) I’m on a mac, and have 3 midi players available to me: Quicktime (free), 
Garage Band(free), Sibelius. Of course, Sibelius is a bad example, because it’s 
a direct competitor with lilypond, but I have it.

2) I’m using this string quartet example: 
http://le-concert.pagesperso-orange.fr/giordani/op-8/10006-giordani-op8-1-lys.zip
 
<http://le-concert.pagesperso-orange.fr/giordani/op-8/10006-giordani-op8-1-lys.zip>

3) I do lilypond 10006-Giordani-Op8-1-Midi-1.ly producing 
10006-Giordani-Op8-1-Midi-1.midi

4) I play it with Quicktime. The result is awful — sounds like the chipmunks 
playing harmonicas.

5) I drag and drop it into Garage band. The result is better, but the 
instruments are wrong: it maps all 3 instruments to something called “String 
ensemble”. Who knows why. So I remap them to vln, vla, cl to something closer 
to a single person playing that instrument. Still sounds poor but much better. 

6) I modify the instrument and the effects. This process takes some time.

7) Now, in order to get a better sound, I’m going to have to go back to the 
lilypond source, make some edits.

8) In order to hear these changes I must redo all the work in #5 and #6.

9) I give my lilypond file to someone. They have no chance of making edits, and 
then recreating what I did in steps 5 and 6.

10 I share my midi file with someone. They have no chance of recreating the 
sound I’m getting. I’d have to send them the Garage Band file, and hope they 
have a mac, and they don’t downloading this huge app (which I think is free).

There’s nothing like this with PDF or any other aspect of this process. If I 
want a decent Midi performance using lilypad, I must either keep redoing steps 
6 and 7 with every edit, which probably is not feasible. What’s more likely is 
I’ll do step 5 over and over, and then at some point say “this is the final 
version” and fine-tune the midi performance. 

Perhaps I’m wrong but some of this. I hope so…

-d

> Integrated score editing environments like Frescobaldi could probably
> include a General MIDI soundfont and a MIDI player, but I don’t think
> Lilypond should ensure the availability of MIDI players.  It already
> doesn’t care what DVI or PDF viewer is installed (if any).
> 
> Lilypond currently doesn’t generate all performance information that the
> MIDI format allows.  When MIDI itself becomes the limiting factor (which
> it is not now) it may make sense to also offer OSC support.
> 
> ~~ Ricardo
>