MusicallyInspired wrote on 2022-06-15, 16:27:
So my audio interface went kaput and I can no longer communicate with my physical MT-32 until I get a new one. I'm trying to utilize MUNT VSTi in the meantime for composing. However, my DAW (Cakewalk by Bandlab) doesn't support sending sysex messages to VSTi's at all. I was wondering how possible it might be to add a feature to the MUNT VSTi to manually open SYX files for emulating the "dump" of its contents into MUNT VSTi's memory as a workaround. That would be the only way I can use it in Cakewalk. The only other way around is to run MIDI Player separately with MUNT VSTi loaded (or even the standard MUNT WDM MIDI driver frontend) and route the audio back into Cakewalk via "VA Cable" but that adds a significant amount of input latency that is just awful for performance. Using the MUNT VSTi directly in the DAW is the only way I've found so far that makes it comfortable to play. This is my only hangup with using MUNT VSTi for composition/performance.
For that matter, having a function to dump the current timbre memory to a SYX file the same way an MT-32 can dump its memory to its MIDI Out port might be nice as well. But that's an extra pipedream.
Hi,
I suspect you are the one who also sent me an email about this same issue.
1. OK, as a fast solution now you can Drag&Drop .syx files to the main user interface of the plugin. Notice that the SysEx sequence is directly sent to the mt32emu synth engine bypassing the frontend's SysEx parser so only native MT-32 SysEx messages work, GM/GS/XG SysEx resets do not.
2. I do not think I will implement such SysEx dump feature in the near future. Maybe you can convince Serg to implement this at the core library level and make an API call for dumping timbre states.
Other:
I have added GS/XG/GM2 style multiple drum channel support to Munt VSTi. More precisely in Dual synth GM mode one more Drum/Percussion channel is supported on the 2nd synth besides channel 10 on the 1st synth.
So to use the 2nd drum channel you have to use either channel 9, or 11-16. Based on my experiences 99% of Midi files that use a 2nd Drum channel use one of these channels.
The easiest way to set the 2nd Drum channel manually is either sending XG Reset and setting Bank MSB to 127 or sending GM2 Reset and setting Bank MSB to 120 on any channels of the 2nd synth.
Drum channels now are colored green on the interface of the plugin.
I have also added some test files that use 2 Drum channels to the test zip:
https://falcosoft.hu/munt_vsti_test.zip
Multiple drum channel support is also added to OPL3VSTi. In case of OPL3VSTi there are no such channel restrictions as in case of Munt VSTi. Any channel can be a Drum channel.
You can set Drum channels manually the same way as written above.
https://falcosoft.hu/opl3_vsti_test.zip
I'm aware that full GS/XG/GM2 support is not a realistic option for such plugins but playing melodic instruments where drums are expected is the most disturbing aspect of GM only support.