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Originally Posted by Geep
Gus, Really very informative and interesting. My question is based on the fact that Sound Canvas is the standard for judging a Pro Midi GM/GS. Does this Cantabile setup with reverb plugins support individual sends into the reverb? Professional General Midi or .kar files have this data embeded as CC (continuous controllers) which can change rev. send throughout a song for individual instruments. ( No reverb on bass is common to avoid a muddy mix) How about the CC for chorus send does Cantabile have it. I went to the web site and see no send return loops nor multi prossesor support. Still I think you can find a multitimbral soundfont player with built in reverb that will follow CCautomation to slip into Cantabile. ....EDIT later RGC sfz+, yeah I got it from Audionews.ru. It has built in reverb and chorus so I can assume you can't edit the CC's for these effects in your app. It had no sounds of its own so I got some free sf2 drum kits at Angular Momentum VST. Stand alone has problems but VST in host good but drum mode doesn't sustain as it should from a key tap (sustain pedal perhaps) and the HiHat cymbals don't cut each other off as they must. A dedicated drum VST is advisable. If you choose to go there, sf support is cool but a good pro drum kit is 80 to 300 meg. for 8 to 12 drums as opposed to 9 meg for 60 or so. EZ Drummer is a good comprimise or Battery 3 .
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I'm going to admit, you went way over my head. I'm not a musician, just an enthusiast with a passion for procedurally generated music. I can't even read sheet music beyond a few basics
I don't know if Cantabile can read those kinds of files. I tend to stick to standard MIDI files because I'm an enthusiast, not a musician, and I have no idea where I'd get PGM or KAR files :P As for sfz, my beef is that the default reverb is barely audible, and few MIDI files if any specify their own. So I just load up a reverb plugin and manually specify reverb settings that add depth without muddying the audio. If I had sfz+, I could tweak that, though.
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| Reaper demo is available and fully functional with no time limit if you can deal with that level of complexity. Then there is SONAR 6 PE. If you torrent it's "try before you buy". |
I'll take a look.
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| I will tell you that such difficulty as you describe about playing a MIDI file from Winamp can usually be solved by routing thru the MS MIDI then to your MIDI generator. |
I'll give it a try. The benefit of this would be that I could have a MIDI playlist, as Cantabile doesn't support that. Maybe we should request it for the next version, but I imagine it'd be pretty low priority.
Speaking of the next version, though, when I asked the author of Cantabile about allowing much bigger buffers (Cantabile is meant for real-time performances, not auditioning, so CPU usage spikes in the soundfont engine can empty the buffer really quickly), he mentioned that he might add pre-render support for the next version. That is, to allow it to pause at the beginning of playback to pre-render, say, 10 seconds ahead (only when using the built-in MIDI sequencer). Everything else would be done real-time, it's just that the MIDI would be pre-rendered through, say, sfz, so that there'd be a cache. This would solve the problems without requiring annoyingly large buffers.
He said this would also go well with the multiprocessor support that he's adding next version, but that it'd only support the built-in MIDI sequencer, not stuff coming in through a MIDI input. Since obviously it can't look ahead in MIDI input :P
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| Another much overlooked option is the Direct X MS Synth which has reverb but is only directly accessible to apps like Winamp, not MS system MIDI nor Vanbasco Karaoke Player. If you compare it to Creatve you will find fatter bass and tighter reverb but on some files crash cymbals are a bit much. Try comparing the 2 with Sublime - Santeria.kar the 22k one and you will instantly hear the difference. Winamp / options/preferences/plugins/input/Nullsoft MIDI player/configure/Device/DirectMusic Microsoft Synthesizer. Good Luck with what ever your choices. GEEP |
I've been completely unable to find any good GM/GS DLS2 files to use with the DX synth. I've tried to convert some SoundFont 2 sample sets, but generally the converters do a horrible job and it sounds like utter crap. Volumes/pitches all wrong. And the default DLS2 file (Roland SoundCanvas sample set, IIRC?) is pretty tiny and pretty... aged.
EDIT: About the other file format support in Cantabile, you could ask the author. He has a blog where he details the progress on the next version of the software:
http://www.toptensoftware.com/blog/
