No suitable instruments for particular MIDI programs

Please attach the SMF in question.

I'm pretty sure it's not a GM file as Tambourine is not mapped to program 37 in General MIDI, but is a bass sound, hence the definition in Instruments.xml

Otherwise you are free to use the Mixer to assign specific sounds to instruments, but bear in mind that if the SMF you are importing does not comply to the GM1 standard then it will not conform to the instruments defined in Instruments.xml

I think he was sayng talking about the track *above* the tambourine track. I discussed this with him over IRC. I guess in the original MSCZ file, the staff used the "Electric Bass" instrument, with the Mixer used to set the MIDI program to 37 - Slap Bass 2. Exported to MIDI, you lose everything but the number "37", from which trig-ger's MIDI import code was attempting to guess what instrument this MIDI program number might best corresponds to, so he could set the staff up reasonably.

In cases where the program number is used by one or more instruments in the instruments.xml file, you can simply choose one of those (and he has a heuristic for choosing between them). But for a program number like 37 that is not used anywhere in instruments.xml, there literally no information to draw from currently in MuseScore to allow the MIDI import code to know what instrument to use for the staff. So no way to guess what clef or transposition to use.

I suggested a simple but effective method: if you don't find an instrument in instruments.xml that uses program 37, try 36, 35, 34, etc until you find a match. If you know the organization of the General MIDI programs, you'll see why that will usually work well enough to give us a reaosnable instrument to use in setting up the staff. The only cases I found where it failed were for "Orchestra Hit" (which would map to a choir using that algorithm) and "Fiddle" which would map to a bagpipe, of all things). So I suggested special casing those two. Oh yeah, also check for the *range* 80-103 and 112-127, and just set up a generic synthesizer and one-line percussion staff respectively for program numbers in those ranges.

Here are the mscz and MIDI (both produced in 1.3, I believe).