MIDI and rests?

[Christ van Willegen]

Hi all,

I don't know if this has been noted before... but I searched the mails
that I have, and I've looked in the documentation of both Lilypond and
Timidity...

I'm busy generating MIDI files for people in my choir, to aid in
studying pieces. I usually edit the notes per voice in a separate
file, which I inlude in 2 .ly files (one for PDF and one for MIDI,
although I know that one would suffice).

Sometimes, not all the voices start singing at the same time, so I
have to use rests in the music to get the voices to line up correctly.

When I use Timidity to convert Lily's .midi files to raw audio format,
there is no silence at the start, making combining the seperate voice
in Audicity a lot harder.

Are the rests not output to the MIDI file by Lilypond, or are the
rests skipped by Timidity when generating the output?

Christ van Willegen