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Re: [fluid-dev] Soundfonts DO need an initial pitch wheel sensitivity ge


From: Lorenzo Sutton
Subject: Re: [fluid-dev] Soundfonts DO need an initial pitch wheel sensitivity generator
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2022 19:09:43 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.2.2

Hi,

On 19/09/2022 18:18, Tom M. via fluid-dev wrote:
One thing that keeps annoying me about Soundfonts is that there is no
way to specify the initial pitch of an instrument in the instrument
itself. The spec defines generators for an "initial attenuation",
"initial filter Q and FC", and many more. But there is no such thing
when it comes to the initial pitch wheel sensitivity or pitch bend
range. Everything completely relies on the default initialization of
MIDI RPN0, which is defined to be 2 semitones.

[...]

Any opinions or comments?
Tom

Honestly, IMHO I feel pitch bend sensitivity should not be defined by the synth and/or the soundfont for various reasons.

In the case of hardware pitch bend the choice of sensitivity (i.e. range) can really depend on the hardware control and person using it... They might want a broader range to move the controller less or a smaller range to have more fine-grained.

Additionally because the pitch bend value is fixed at 14 bits (i.e. +/- 8191), increasing the sensitivity will decrease precision (results depending on the synth / soundfont). So the choice should be left to the user.

It is de facto standard that by default the range is +/- 2 semitones (although I couldn't find it directly in the MIDI standard), so changing the default could be confusing and break existing MIDI (and MIDI-based sequencer / DAW) files.

Lorenzo.



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