Re: MIDI Bank Select proposal (was Re: [fluid-dev] Re: Son of ticket #65)

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Tuesday, August 10, 2010, Elimar Green wrote:
> It seems simple enough to revert the behavior to 1.0.9 functionality.
> This should work fine in most cases, as far as the whole MSB is
> actually LSB when only the MSB is received.
>
> I can understand David wanting to release ASAP, since he has been
> waiting for a while to do so.  But I think the behavior of the bank
> switching should be dealt with, since I see it as being pretty trivial
> to fix and a significant enough of an issue.  This doesn't mean
> implementing the MIDI mode setting at this time.  It simply just needs
> to be reverted to the previous behavior, which means that if only the
> MSB is received prior to a Program Change, then it should be
> interpreted as LSB.  If both MSB and LSB are received, they should
> combine to select the bank (once the Program Change is received) as
> MSB * 128 + LSB.  In cases where a MIDI file or device is expecting GS
> behavior, I don't think it would ever send an LSB message.  So this
> logic should work in all MIDI modes.  There were no complaints about
> this in 1.0.9 and previous.
>
> Lets put off the MIDI mode switching logic, SYSEX interpretation, etc.
>  The code has already been implemented and could be taken from SVN
> history, but it would need to be integrated with the new code base,
> tested, etc.
>
> How does that sound?
>
> Elimar

I agree that we can leave the SYSEX stuff for a future release, avoiding the  
risk of spend too much time implementing and testing this feature. In 
addition to your code, I've included similar functionality in kmidimon.

I disagree with simply reverting to 1.0.9, because adding a new  
setting "midi.bank-select" with several options is easy enough, and may be 
needed for accurate playback of different songs. In my opinion, the default 
should be the awe32 mode, as recommended by the appendix 1 of the SF2 
standard.

Regards,
Pedro