My name is Joël and I work with computer music for 20 years. I started with Gtk+-2.0 for UI as it was released around 2002 and did my first programming experience with ANSI C99. Most coding was done on an intel based notebook running debian unstable.

Since hacking is a time expensive task, I enjoy creating music by importing SMF to my sequencer software.

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A future goal would be to make more music and less programming.

So can you recommend any websites for SMF download?

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regards, Joël

I began working with MIDI in 1982, right after I graduated college with a degree in classical music theory and composition.  My friend Gary Leuenberger, who is a pianist and who owned a piano store in San Francisco, where I live, called me one day around 1985 to invite me and a few other musicians to hear Bach's Brandenburg Concerto in D major, the first movement, that he programmed for 8 DX-7s (the TX816 rack) using the Yamaha QX-1 sequencer.   I was hooked.  From that day until today, I've been immersed in MIDI composition and production.  I've scored for TV, film, dance, animation, games, documentaries and other commercial projects before I "retired" from soundtrack work to focus on my own compositions and albums.  I am also immersed in astrophotography and have produced, so far, 17 music videos featuring my astrophotographs set to music.  Some of the soundtracks are specifically written for the music videos, some are symphonic movements and other works I've composed for my albums.  

I'm not allowed to post the link to my website but it's easy to find. I'm currently working on my 14th symphony for virtual instruments.  Feel free to ask me anything you want about MIDI composition and production. Maybe I can be of help.

Jerry

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A sustained note slowly fades out using expression, and then the next note instantly jumps to expression 127 on the same tick that the previous note has been turned off.  This causes transients from the previous note to briefly sound at full volume.  In one previous soundtrack I ended up duplicating the tracks and then alternating each original track's notes between the two new tracks.

I've tried to work around it this time by gapping the string notes, which only helps somewhat.  So I want to see if there is some sort of "smoothing" I can do in any of the commonly available Windows MIDI editors to make the expression of the new note blend with the one of the old so the transition isn't so jarring.  I have Anvil Studio, Sekaiju, and Sonar as the main ones I use, plus assorted others for converting to/from text etc.  I would only need it to apply to the strings, which sometimes share a track/channel with one or more other instrument(s).

If worse comes to worse, I can always do the duplicate/alternate hack again, but it's time consuming (and I haven't added that in to my editor yet 😆 ) but I'd rather just be able to have it sound good without all the extra modification.

So commands might look like

Bend 250

Note On A

Bend 0

Note On B

Since both bend commands occur on the same tick, will both bends be applied correctly, or will both notes get Bend 250, or will both get Bend 0?

I can't seem to find anything in the specs that specifically mention it.  I was under the assumption that only the last bend would be used, since I have been working with files that typically are single-note-at-a-time.  However,  now that I am looking at some multi-note files, I am wondering if I was mistaken.  If both bends DO apply, then I will need to modify my duplicate-command pruning function to be more selective.

That made it much harder than it should be to update things in the editor and keep track of other things like file location indexes and such.  I finally got fed up enough with it a few months ago to re-write the core from scratch.  The new code is so much more efficient, organized, and flexible.

As I'm running all of my old test files through the new editor, I'm occasionally finding things that either weren't a problem in my old code, or were and I couldn't fix, or were things that I never realized were a problem.

The most recent that I just discovered is that, unbeknownst to me, running status is NOT ended if you hit a META event.  It just picks right back up after the META event!  Took me a bit to figure out what was happening, as I have always assumed that META events could not be running (they can't) and as such, the running status flag should be disabled.  So I disabled it and always wrote the command byte for the next event.  But a test file I have has only a single Note-On command in the whole file and all the rest are running status, with META text events between groups of notes.  My saved copy of this file should have been near-identical, except now it had a bunch of Note-Ons that weren't present in the original.  Now that I've realized how running status ACTUALLY behaves around META events, I am able to reproduce an exact copy of the test file after loading, parsing, sorting events, and then rebuilding at the end.

Just thought it was interesting and a good bit of information to know for those who are working on their own software.

The new version of my editor will be posted on my Google Drive when it is "ready", and then I can finally finish up the next soundtrack-in-progress for the SNES MIDI Remaster Project.  If you are more interested about the inner workings of the editor, you can check some of my older posts on this forum as well as posts over on the Gamemaker forums.

https://forum.gamemaker.io/index.php

More to come.