Re: MIDI and Volta repeats in parallel music

[Michael Ellis]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 10:33 PM, Peter Chubb <address@hidden> wrote:

My point I think is that the structure is the structure of the voice,
not the structure of the staff.  Which is why, BTW, the MIDI repeats
don't unfold.

Visibly the structure voice shows the repeats, but the repeats aren't
actually in the music voice.

I do understand that and it makes sense for LP to support almost any crazy thing a composer might do.  As practical matter, however,  having volte in one voice and not another is extremely rare.  I don't think I've ever seen that in a score.   

I haven't looked at the LilyPond code for \repeat, so I'm just guessing here, but it seems to me that  maybe \repeat unfold is wrong tool for job since it operates at the level of music expressions.   Maybe what's needed is lower level code that operates at the level of midi file timing.  I think it's analogous to what LP has to do to put the repeat bars and other staff-level annotations from one voice in the right spatial location to relative to another voice's.  That's a non-trivial task in itself, without even getting into what LP does to avoid vertical collisions. 

So it if were up to me (and it certainly isn't), I'd like to see some effort put into developing a new command to designated one voice as a 'master' in the midi block, so that one might write something like

\score {

      << \structure \\ voiceA \\ voiceB  ... >>

      \midi {

          \master \structure

      }

}

to tell LP "Keep track of the repeats in the master and copy/paste as needed in the other voices to make it so."

This is a good discussion and I hope we can continue it.  I'm going to be traveling for the next 2 days so if my responses aren't immediate it doesn't mean I'm not interested.

Cheers,
Mike