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

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Thursday, August 12, 2010, Jim Henry wrote:
> Again I am just making an observation regarding something I don't do so
> I could be completely off base. Is one of the uses of FluidSynth
> intended to be a MIDI file player that allows the use of sound fonts? If
> so, I think some of those who want to use it that way are likely to have
> little understanding of MIDI and no ability to alter the MIDI files or
> even know what is in them. They'll just want to load a sound font and
> the MIDI file and hear what they expect to hear. FS probably can't do
> that 100% but it needs to do the right thing most of the time or else it
> is going to get a "doesn't work" reputation and it will take a long time
> to shake that after the issue is fixed. The other alternative is to be
> very clear that FS isn't intended for casual playing of MIDI files.
> Trying to write software for use by the masses is really hard because it
> is so difficult to anticipate what they will try to do and to grasp the
> level of understanding or lack thereof. I do front line support of the
> Miditzer, which has a lot of users who know almost nothing about MIDI.
> The experience gives you a very different perspective on what software
> needs to be.

There are many use cases for FluidSynth. Each one of the entries in the 
Applications list [1] may be a different one.

Speaking for my own users, people who uses my KMid [2] in Linux without a 
hardware MIDI synth, usually choose FluidSynth as a soft-synth. KMid 
encourages GM standard song files, but doesn't forbid other extensions. This 
may be a MIDI player use case example.

Another group of users want to make noise with my VMPK [3] in Linux. This 
program is a virtual MIDI controller, emulating one of the GM, GS or XG 
standards. Linux users usually prefer to run the QSynth interface along with  
VMPK, in a real-time-synthesizer use case example.

In both cases FluidSynth may provide the low level infrastructure, but the 
user interface is a higher level GUI, that is where the users should find 
easy to use and accurate functionality.

Regards,
Pedro

[1] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/fluidsynth/wiki/Applications
[2] http://kmid2.sourceforge.net
[3] http://vmpk.sourceforge.net