Re: [Rosegarden-devel] recording and things

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

Chris wrote;

> > like the new mandolin
> > piece
> 
> Is your "like" a verb or a conjunction?

Yes.
 
> I like it, although essentially I chose it because I wanted a
> test piece that looks good in the existing application (it's
> very undemanding to render).  Also it's in 2/4, where our other
> test files are in 4/4, and it has quite a few small changes in
> tempo, which might make it a good test piece for when we get
> real-time timestamps in mapped events.

Yes, when indeed.  Are we waiting for a release or just going to
plow right in at some point?  I would go ahead and start to implement
storing and displaying recorded events at the GUI but then I'd have
to rework this bit when the new timestamps come along so I might
hang off as you (Chris) suggested and synchronise the work.

> The big problem with introducing something like this to the
> distribution is that we don't currently handle any sort of text
> event, which means we can't keep the copyright and transcription
> information from the original MIDI file.

Well it'd be nice to tackle this at the Composition soon along with
support for more esoteric MIDI events (Controller messages, SysExs).

Testing wise, after getting into horrible looping problems this morning and
yesterday when playing and recording using this configuration:

          Rosegarden    (play)   --->  MIDI OUT ---->  Hardware Synth
                                                             |
           (record)                                          |
                                                         MIDI OUT
              ^                                              |
              |                                              |
               ----------------------------------------------

I've now successfully tested this config:

          MIDI Keyboard  (OUT) ------>  (record) Rosegarden (play)
                                                               |
                                                               |
                                                               v
                                                           Hardware Synth

This works for both Rosegarden playing and recording i.e. when Rosegarden
is playing a piece all MIDI events from the keyboard are THRU'd to the Synth
along with piece that's playing, when Rosegarden is recording the events are
still THRU'd to the synth along with events from all playing tracks
but the MIDI events are also captured in Rosegarden.

One issue that raised itself this morning is how to synchronise the 
sounding of the notes to the display on the GUI.  The MIDI OUT box
on the Transport will need to display what is note is currently sounding
and we will undoutedly want pretty little MIDI VU meters on each Track
as visual indication of which Tracks are sounding.  The sequencer reads
a slice of notes to be played and cues them up with aRTS (working slightly
in the future of course) - either we arrange for a per note DCOP callback
to be made when the note finally goes out (undoubtedly expensive with
everything else going on) or we just use simple timing at the GUI to
synchronise the sounding of the note with a relevant display item.

All good clean fun.  Just thoughts.  As incomprehensible as ever I imagine.

R