Lyric representation in MIDI?

[Mats Bengtsson]

Perhaps some of you have MIDI expertise enough to answer the following 
question.

Currently, LilyPond uses a separate track (and channel) for each Lyric 
context to output
the corresponding lyric syllables, so that players like timidity (and 
certainly several other
"Karaoke" like players) can print the lyrics on the screen while playing 
the music.
Using one track for each Lyric context seems like a waste, especially in 
examples like the
"All ye People Clap your Hands" posted earlier today on lilypond-user, 
where the same
lyrics is repeated below each stave for readibility reasons. However, 
even otherwise I
don't really see the point of separating the different lyric lines into 
separate tracks/channels.

Is there any possibility to lump all the lyrics into a single 
track/channel, perhaps even in the
control track (track 0) so that the remaining 14 channels can be used 
for the actual music
(one channel per Staff context, by default)? Because of the lack of 
standardization of MIDI,
I guess you would have to try a number of different sequencers and MIDI 
players to
make sure that this works as expected, or perhaps some of you have 
experience enough to
answer the question anyway?

As far as I can see, there are no channel number indications in the 
lyric messages in the
generated MIDI files, which according to my reading of 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-lilypond/2003-10/msg00069.html
indicates that they actually should be placed in track 0.

For songs with several verses, I guess the lyric printouts won't make 
any sense, no matter how
we place the information in the MIDI files.

   /Mats

--
=============================================
        Mats Bengtsson
        Signal Processing
        School of Electrical Engineering
        Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
        SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
        Sweden
        Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463                         
       Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
        Email: address@hidden
        WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
=============================================