Reply 2020 of 2175, by Meowdori
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Falcosoft wrote on 2024-10-05, 06:41:Hi, I used S-YXG50 VSTi for the investigation since its user interface helps to understand what is happening. When you use FSMP […]
Meowdori wrote on 2024-10-04, 17:37:Hey, it's been a long, long while since i last wrote here, but today an interesting case of inconsistent playback between few di […]
Hey, it's been a long, long while since i last wrote here, but today an interesting case of inconsistent playback between few different MIDI players caught my attention. I can't seem to be able to pinpoint the cause, so any help solving this issue would be appreciated.
One of the Yamaha XG demo songs (see the attachment) plays pretty much the same in FalcoSoft MIDI Player, in MIDITrail and in old Winamp 2.91, with one exception being TMIDI.
The actual differences i've spotted, together with their timestamps are as follows:
- [1:03] - Drum fills sound different (bongos) in TMIDI (starting from that moment, they repeat several times throughout the track)
- [2:32] - Different and stronger snare is only audible in TMIDIDoes anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this inconsistent playback behaviour and which one is the correct sounding of the track?
Hi,
I used S-YXG50 VSTi for the investigation since its user interface helps to understand what is happening.
When you use FSMP you can also use its 'Midi Channels' visualization dialog to follow my explanation.
Your Midi file uses 2 drum channels: 10 and 11. Channel 10 is set to Rock Kit and Channel 11 to Analog Kit by the Midi file.
When your timestamped parts start you can notice on both FSMP's Midi Channel display and on S-YXG50's channel display that both channel 10 and channel 11 are active.
Contrary, when you use TMIDI you can notice from the start that it falsely identifies channel 11 as a melodic channel -> 'Acoustic Guitar (steel) -BK 127',
and when your timestamped parts start you can notice on S-YXG50's channel display that only channel 10 is active, you cannot see any activity on channel 11.
Yet, the notes on channel 11 are audible but they are sent by TMIDI to channel 10 !
It seems that TMIDI sends all drum related notes to channel 10. But the problem is with this approach is that channel 10 and 11 use different drum kits, so when channel 11 notes are sent to channel 10 by TMIDI then you get different sounds.
The bongos are actually there in all players (channel 11), but they are more quiet in case of Analog Kit than in case of Rock Kit.
The same is true for the 'stronger snare'.
So all in all, the other players play this song properly and TMIDI has a strange (and wrong) approach when playing multiple drum channels.PS:
Maybe the idea behind TMIDI's behavior is that in case of Midi devices that cannot use more than 1 drum channel (only channel 10 as defined by GM) you can still hear at least drum sounds even in case of multi-drum channel XG files. Maybe this is true also for multi-drum channel GS files when played by TMIDI. I do not know since I have not tested this.Now, I'm thinking about adding TMIDI's 'wrong' implementation as an optional feature to FSMP 😀
This way drum channel constrained devices like Sound Blaster HW SF2 synths could play multi-drum channel XG/GS Midi files somewhat better.
Hey, thank you for taking your time to investigate this. Now it all makes perfect sense, TMIDI's behaviour is erroneous one, not accounting for the fact that XG standard can initialise any channel as a drum channel.
BTW, i've also been using S-YXG50 as the output synth in all my listening cases, as it's the only way to playback XG MIDI properly, other than owning physical MU-xx synths which are unfortunately rare.