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SMF files not playi...
 
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SMF files not playing properly

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Scott Cooke
Posts: 1
New Member
Topic starter
 

Hi,

This is my first post and a full on dive in!

I have a project that has become unbelievably complex. In the mid 90s I produced a series of dance tracks using nothing but a Mac with an old (even for then) version of Vision (1.?) and an Akai S3000XL sampler. About 10 years ago I made a failed attempt at rescuing all my sequences but managed to use MESA to get my samples onto a Mac and converted them to AIFF.

Now in 2017 I have decided to give it another go I have used a MacBook Pro with Basilisk emulator to run SVP 3.0.2 (had trouble with v4) and exported as Standard Midi File format. Got the sequences and samples into Reason 9 essentials everything worked fine, only issue being trying to get the same effects as the Akai’s EB-16 board but only having the completed tracks on CD to listen too. So I loaded the original samples and effects settings into the S3000XL and used Aria Meastosa to play the SMF (Reason essentials doesn’t have MIDI out) but it was dropping bucket loads of notes so I tried MIDIYoda got the same result with the same notes being dropped. However they both play ALL notes when using the internal sound source (piano being the default sound).

MIDIYoda has an event examiner and editor which slightly late 'note off' events' so I used the editor to end the notes slightly earlier which got the individual MIDI channels to play properly, so I thought it might be a polyphony issue in the Akai settings, IT WASN’T! but it does seem that MIDI channels are cutting each other off when I play all channels

I see Tom Svaleklev posts on here I'm hoping he or someone else has experience of this issue and how to solve it.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 
Posted : 20/02/2017 1:23 pm
Michael Rideout
Posts: 18
Active Member
 

Disclaimer: I'm no expert, and have no experience with that equipment. 🙂

I'm thinking it's a polyphony issue, as you originally suspected. If I've read your post correctly, you're outputting the MIDI file to your old Akai S3000XL, right? It has a rather small polyphony of 32 notes, which works out to an average of 2 simultaneous notes per channel, assuming you're actively using all 16 channels. I'm guessing that when you produced the dance tracks 20ish years ago, you recorded the tracks separately and mixed them together, such that the Akai S3000XL didn't actually need to play more than 32 notes at a time for any given track.

On the other, the MIDI soft synth(s) or whatever that Aria Maestosa and MidiYodi are using probably have a maximum polyphony of 128 notes, or something like that. What you might want to do, just to confirm or deny that it's a polyphony issue, is go into the settings for the MIDI soft synth(s) and change the maximum polyphony to 32 notes, to match the Akai S3000XL's polyphony, and see what happens.

 
Posted : 26/02/2017 2:52 pm
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