Re: midi articulation

[Carl Sorensen]

On 3/25/16 10:31 AM, "Daniel Birns" <address@hidden> wrote:

>PDF viewers is a different class of problem.
>
>
>I¹ll be concrete.
>
>
>1) I¹m 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 it¹s a direct competitor with lilypond, but I have it.

Quicktime and Garage Band are free as in beer, but they are still
proprietary, which means you can't alter or improve them.

It seems to me that rather than reinvent the wheel, you should be looking
at free software, rather than proprietary software. It will either work
well, or it will need some improvement.  And you could make the
improvements in much less time than you can code from scratch.

I'm on a mac as well, and I have Aria Maestosa as a free option.

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ariamaestosa


It seems to work well to me (but I don't have your midi file to see how
bad it sounds).  I'm just testing some midi files from some LilyPond
projects of mine.


I also have timidity++, but I need to build that from source, so it may be
beyond the ability of the typical user.

Many people in the Linux music world seem to use Timidity++ or FluidSynth.
 Here's an ubuntu page that describes how to do it:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Midi/SoftwareSynthesisHowTo


The Frescobaldi manual recommends using Qsynth (which is a GUI to
FluidSynth), but I haven't been able to get that to work yet (I haven't
spent significant time trying, though).

It seems to me that starting with these tools, and making whatever
improvements you desire, and teaching LilyPond users how to use them, is a
more practical way of getting great MIDI output than writing your own MIDI
synthesizer.

But if you disagree, that's fine.  I don't want to throw any hurdles in
your way.  I'm just hoping to help.

Thanks,

Carl