Mixer

• Mar 8, 2019 - 00:10

I remember that there was an attempt to make the preset picking part of interacting with the mixer easier. It didn't particularly work with custom soundfonts, but it seems like a thing we could talk about.

So, if you add an instrument to a score, the current mixer doesn't take a particularly smart approach to assigning a preset. It just goes to the spot it expects the desired sound to exist and uses that, or defaults to preset 0 if there is no sound there.

Would it work if the bank and preset were not the only thing checked? what about the name of the preset?

If you added a piano instrument, and there was no piano found at bank 0, preset 0 - there was no sound, or the preset's name did not include the string 'piano' in it, then the mixer could look for all presets with the string 'piano' in the name, set the first one it finds as the chosen sound, and use the others to populate the dropdown list, with a 'more' option so a user can access the full list of available presets.

This could also happen when a new soundfont is added to the synthesizer - check for everything with the string 'piano', associate that list of presets with all of the instruments that call for a piano-type sound.

I think that might end with a much better(quicker) user experience with the mixer for people that have a large amount of presets.

There might be translation issues, and I can think of instruments where you would want more than one string associated - for 'violin' I'd want 'violin' and 'string'.


Comments

This would be very nice!!!

But... Remember that there are soundfont files that don't follow the Standard General MIDI order and instrument names.

You could find a soundfont file with the bank 0, patch 0, label as "Yamaha Grand Concert", when the standard defines it only as "Piano".

Or, worst... You could find a soundfont file with nothing on the bank 0, patch 0. And when I say "nothing", I want to say... "NOTHING"!!!

So...

I would love if MuseScore will include a new feature, with your idea, but adding the capability to load, always, a minimal soundfont file in the synthesizer to get, at least, one sound to all the MIDI instruments possibilities.

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