[iiwusynth-devel] Re: Pitch bend, filter, sysex, LADSPA,...

[Josh Green]

On Sat, 2002-04-06 at 11:48, M. Nentwig wrote:
> 
> Yup. It's a simple host, which understands a five-word control language.
> It can process LADSPA networks of arbitrary size. There is a small
> manual (PDF and HTML) in a folder in iiwusynth/src (on sourceforge).
> Just give it a try, the directory should be ready for compilation (after
> autogen).
> You'll have to ./configure --enable-ladspa (all small letters) to
> include it. But the LADSPA plugins are not included. I use CMT and SWH
> plugins, and 'alienwah'. I can forward them to you, if you are
> interested.

I've got all those LADSPA plugins IIRC.

> The environment variable LADSPA_PATH needs to be set, this is LADSPA
> standard (export LADSPA_PATH=/usr/local/lib/ladspa should do).
> 

Of course :)

> 
> Well, the keyboard changes the bank to 16000-and-then-some each time I
> press a program button. The sound fonts are usually on bank 0. So there
> is no preset on the channel after the program change.
> So 'useless' is maybe the wrong word (I could change the bank of a
> soundfont before using it), but it's complicated.
> And if I dig into the keyboard manual deep enough, there might even be a
> way to send only prog changes without bank change - after all, that
> beast is called a master keyboard.
> 

Hmm. I believe the bank select MIDI message uses the most significant
byte of a 14 bit control. I'm not really sure exactly why it works this
way. Seems strange to me. So setting bank 1 would mean sending 1 for the
MSB MIDI CC 0 and sending 0 for LSB MIDI CC 20 which would actually be
128. At least this is how my ALSA code does things. So the maximum bank
number (when thinking in MIDI control terms) would be 16383, which would
come out to bank 127. Still seems strange to me, perhaps my code is a
actually broken? Now that I think about it, how the heck would you set
bank 128 (for drums) with the use of only one 7 bit value. Somethings
not right. Bad Smurf.. Bad bad Smurf!

Sounds like your keyboard should be messed with though, not iiwusynth.
Many sound fonts have multiple banks of sounds, disabling this feature
in iiwusynth, will break for one thing, Swami (with the entire sound
font load feature). How would one select percussion sounds, etc?
Anyways..
        Josh Green