Re: [Rosegarden-devel] More GS/Studio thoughts...

[Richard B. <bo...@bo...>]

On Wednesday 11 December 2002 02:24, Silvan wrote:

> The question is:  what's an elegant way to handle the fact that patch
> changes in bank 0 0 on channel 10 in GS control drum kits?

Hmm.  That's a good one.  Logic uses two concepts - a Multi-Instrument 
(which is basically what our Devices/Instruments are) and a 
Mapped-Instrument for drum sounds as you describe (not to be confused 
with our internaetl MappedInstruments).

I think we can specify an additional category for a given Bank i.e. have 
a child of a Bank being a Bank of a certain channel and each program 
change maps to a different drum kit.

> I comes before M, so now my first "port" is IWU, and my second "port"
> is MIDI 0-0.  What that means is the synths are crossed up in every
> file I've done with RG up until now.

Ok, there's a lot of confusion about Devices/Instruments at the moment.  
Here's hopefully a reasonable explanation of what's going on.

ALSA client IDs basically define device ordering on the Instrument drop 
down.  Your soundcard synth usually has (say) an ALSA client ID of 65, 
the external MIDI port on that card is 64.  iiwusynth is a soft client 
and has an ID starting higher up at 129 (the Rosegarden sequencer takes 
128).  So on a typical setup say with my SBLive I get the following 
clients:

emu10k1 wavetable  - 65
external MIDI port - 64
iiwusytnh          - 129

Some internal re-ordering has gone on to frig the wavetable synth to the
front of the queue to make this is the default Device/Instruments for 
all Tracks.

In the Device/Bank dialog these devices will all show up but be labelled 
according to the loaded (and user defineable) Device label.  For 
example on my setup:

emu10k1 wavetable  - 65    - GMSynth
external MIDI port - 64    - Yamaha QY-70
iiwusytnh          - 129   - (whatever the default device name is)

The Devices in the Device/Bank dialog will be ordered alphabetically but 
this order has no bearing on the Device->Bank Mappings.

You can quickly change the mappings for a whole Device by importing the 
Banks (and overwriting) from a Studio file.  Or using Copy and Paste 
Bank.

[..]

Anyway, basically I agree that at the moment you can do a lot of stuff 
but it's not clear how and it can be a bit of a pain and longwinded.  A 
first step to clear this up is to get the Device names on the 
Instrument dropdowns relating to the Devices in the Bank manager - 
we're half way there with the cascading menus.  Also we can do a lot 
with the pretty awful Remap Instruments dialog and associated 
paraphenalia to make this a more pleasing experience.

B