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The current song I am working on has an instrument that is fully panned to 127. However, if I mute all other channels and just listen to that one, I'm getting sound out of both channels, with the left producing sound at roughly half the volume as the right channel.
Reverb in the file is set to 30, chorus is 10.
The sound is a square wave in a SF2 sountfont, playing back with CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth.
In the original game audio (not MIDI), the sound is almost entirely only audible on the right channel, with maybe 2-4% on the left. (The SNES also does some "crosstalk" for stereo seperation).
Is this a result of the reverb and chorus settings? Or is something else going on? I was expecting to delete a bunch of erroneous pan commands, but they simply weren't in the file to remove. Others that I did remove on other channels made absolutely zero difference in the playback of the file (both versions recorded as wavs with Audacity and one of them inverted, then merged produced a perfectly silent file)
Posted : 18/01/2025 9:56 am
I think the reverb and chorus has no effect on it. I think it is just an unusual pan implementation that the synthesizer library uses.
I didn't install CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth to test with, but I see that CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth uses the BASS and BASSMIDI libraries from Un4seen Developments. Synthesia also uses these libraries. Also, the BASSMIDI zip file download has a simple miditest.exe example program that can play MIDI files using these libraries.
I made a test MIDI file that plays a note at several different pan values. I also made a simple sine wave soundfont. I made some audio recordings of my test MIDI file playing with my sine wave soundfont in Synthesia and in the miditest.exe example program. I get the same kind of results from both of them:
P is the MIDI pan value
L is the left channel amplitude (percent of maximum)
R is the right channel amplitude (percent of maximum)
| P | L | R |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 100 | 50 |
| 15 | 98 | 48 |
| 29 | 92 | 50 |
| 43 | 85 | 58 |
| 57 | 78 | 65 |
| 71 | 65 | 78 |
| 85 | 58 | 85 |
| 99 | 50 | 92 |
| 113 | 48 | 98 |
| 127 | 50 | 100 |
I've been looking through the BASS and BASSMIDI documentation and forum, but so far I haven't found a way to change this pan implemenation to something else.
Posted : 19/01/2025 7:34 am
Topic starter
Hmm, yes, a most peculiar implementation indeed. At least I know the file isn't broken now 🙂 It's interesting that the 15% pan is more panned than 0.
Posted : 19/01/2025 7:57 am
