Rolled marimba chords cause playback to choke up
I notice this happens most often when using my preferred soundfont (General User GS) and with the three-slash tremolo to notate a roll. It seems to be related to issue #67896: Bogs Down and may just be my machine being old and cranky. This sometimes also affects tympani parts, especially if there are multiple marimba parts playing at the same time.
My current workaround is to use a two-slash tremolo, since that gets the point across to the musician and plays nicely with playback. However, the three-slash tremolo is what is used more often in notation.
That all said, the root causes are:
- Probably: General User GS has a much longer resonance than the default sondfont, meaning the decay of previous notes stacks to a greater degree than default
- Marimba (and vibraphone, piano, xylophone, etc…) rolls on chords aren't played as a tremolo of a chord—they're played as rapid arpeggiations of the chord (or maybe, for a 4-note chord, rapid alternating pairs of 2 notes)
- My computer is just that old
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Were your circumstances similar?
Also, I think I may create a feature request to improve marimba roll playback by having them be played as arpeggios instead of playing the entire chord for every note of the tremolo.
Comments
Suspect reason 3 or a soundcard issue but post the score and others can try to see if it occurs on their systems/setups. Plays OK on my machine apart from a few clicks. AMD Athlon II x 4 620, xubuntu 16.04, MS 2.0.2 with seven marimbas playing simultaneously,
In reply to Suspect reason 3 or a by underquark
I've attached my test score. It seem that it does depend on the SoundFont being used, so it probably is reason 3. However, there seems to be a definite correlation between the rolls sounding awful and the playback not choking up. The soundfonts that don't choke things up sound like a synthesiser's marimba patch spamming chords in a most unmusical manner, while the soundfonts that sound consistently good are the ones that eventually cause playback to choke (I really wish there were a panic button to stop and reset all sound output, instead of having to pause playback and wait for the decay on the notes to finish completely).
Plays OK on my computer which is an Intel i3 running Windows 10
So I too suspect reason 3
I tested the score with General User GS and the default soudfont.
I'm not sure that the kind of playback you are wanting would be possible to implement.
If you want this, then probably your best bet would be to use the Piano Roll editor to achieve it, which I believe has had some improvements lately - it's not something I use as a rule so I haven'ted tried it.