Re: dynamics and midi

[Anthony]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Grammostola Rosea
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I made some score for my mama for practicing  vocals....  How do I get those
>  dynamics in  the midi  output?
>

I know that dynamics in lilypond generated midi files use the volume
controller to create "dynamics" effects.  The actual "note" velocities
remain the same no matter what dynamics are used.  So, if you play a
midi file and don't get any dynamic effects then it may be due to the
fact that your midi player is not using the volume channel and is
instead using note velocity to determine volume.  I know pianoteq
software does this and therefore any lilypond generated midi sent to
pianoteq to render will not have any dynamics at all.

The code you pasted does create a midi file with volume changes so the
dynamics are working perfectly fine the way lilypond does things.  It
just isn't a perfect way.  It may be possible to create a program to
go in afterwards and modify all the volume messages to max and adjust
the individual note velocities to values that the volume controller
had been using.  I think I had done this once in the past.  I was
originally going to simply delete the volume control events in the
midi but the library I was using to modify the files (was something in
python iirc) messed up the timing of the file if I did so.

I'll look back into the code if you would be interested.  (Bear in
mind that I'm not much of a programmer but I've been known to hack
together stuff that somehow "works" most of the time.) :)

-Anthony