skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfonts)

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dinoroo
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Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:49 pm

skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfonts)

Post by dinoroo »

I'm trying to isolate a problem that I've been having with some songs I'm working on. It seems that MTS has problems playing some midi notes in certain places on my songs. It typically happens with runs of 16th notes or eigth notes followed by a series of 16th notes where it skips the 16th notes. So far I've only been playing back the midi with soundfonts that are loaded into the MTS app.

Now if I scrub the cursor back and forth over the notes they play fine, and I can scrub faster than the song normally plays and it still plays them fine, but when I try to play it back normally it skips right over them as if they weren't even there. This has happened with the same series of notes using many different soundfonts, so I don't think it's a problem with the soundfont per se. Sometimes if I increase the duration of the note, it solves the problem (say from a 32nd note to a 16th note), and other times it doesn't. I'd be happy to share a MTS save file with you so you can try it for yourself.

One other problem I've noticed is with a midi drum track and soundfonts. When I play a succession of 8th notes on an open high hat, for example, the last part of the high hat sound gets truncated, giving it a very artificial, unnatural sound. Normally on a drum hit it will play the entire duration of the soundfont, even when that drum is hit again. Is there some limit to the number of notes that can be played at once that's forcing the sound file to be cut off early?

Thanks!
Support
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Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2004 2:17 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

OK, please send MIDI files showing both issues to support@multitrackstudio.com. While at it maybe you can include the sf2 files as well, so I have the same files you tried.


Giel Bremmers
Support
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Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

Thanks for the files. I've had a quick look at them using the Mac version (not the iPad version).
dinoroo wrote:I'm trying to isolate a problem that I've been having with some songs I'm working on. It seems that MTS has problems playing some midi notes in certain places on my songs. It typically happens with runs of 16th notes or eigth notes followed by a series of 16th notes where it skips the 16th notes. So far I've only been playing back the midi with soundfonts that are loaded into the MTS app.
The timpani rolls sound strange indeed. Will look into that.
dinoroo wrote:One other problem I've noticed is with a midi drum track and soundfonts. When I play a succession of 8th notes on an open high hat, for example, the last part of the high hat sound gets truncated, giving it a very artificial, unnatural sound.
In the example you sent open hihat notes are cut off because you play a closed hihat shortly after the open hihat. Is that what you mean or am I looking at the wrong part?
This is expected behavior. You can't play this on a real hihat either, samplers mimic this through 'exclusive groups'.


Giel Bremmers
Support
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Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2004 2:17 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

Support wrote:
dinoroo wrote:I'm trying to isolate a problem that I've been having with some songs I'm working on. It seems that MTS has problems playing some midi notes in certain places on my songs. It typically happens with runs of 16th notes or eigth notes followed by a series of 16th notes where it skips the 16th notes. So far I've only been playing back the midi with soundfonts that are loaded into the MTS app.
The timpani rolls sound strange indeed. Will look into that.
Hmm, on closer inspection it actually seems to playback the timpani rolls fine.

I did notice an oddity in your file though: there's two bars of timpani rolls at the end. The 11th note appears twice. You can't easily see that because they're identical. If you show the note velocity editor and zoom in horizontally you can see there are two 'velocity bars' for the 11th note. Does it playback OK if you fix this?


Giel Bremmers
Support
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Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2004 2:17 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

And now the timpani rolls are missing notes again. Interesting...


Giel Bremmers
dinoroo
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:49 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by dinoroo »

I'll try to sent a few more soundfont examples. There's some guitar soundfonts that work great in BS-16i but the notes get badly cut off in MTS.

Support wrote:Thanks for the files. I've had a quick look at them using the Mac version (not the iPad version).
dinoroo wrote:I'm trying to isolate a problem that I've been having with some songs I'm working on. It seems that MTS has problems playing some midi notes in certain places on my songs. It typically happens with runs of 16th notes or eigth notes followed by a series of 16th notes where it skips the 16th notes. So far I've only been playing back the midi with soundfonts that are loaded into the MTS app.
The timpani rolls sound strange indeed. Will look into that.
dinoroo wrote:One other problem I've noticed is with a midi drum track and soundfonts. When I play a succession of 8th notes on an open high hat, for example, the last part of the high hat sound gets truncated, giving it a very artificial, unnatural sound.
In the example you sent open hihat notes are cut off because you play a closed hihat shortly after the open hihat. Is that what you mean or am I looking at the wrong part?
This is expected behavior. You can't play this on a real hihat either, samplers mimic this through 'exclusive groups'.


Giel Bremmers
Support
Posts: 1717
Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2004 2:17 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

dinoroo wrote:I'll try to sent a few more soundfont examples. There's some guitar soundfonts that work great in BS-16i but the notes get badly cut off in MTS.
I'd like to see that. As of yet I'm under the impression the problem only occurs with 'oneshot' soundfonts, ie. instruments that ignore note-off messages like percussion instruments. Guitars don't fit in that picture of course.


Giel Bremmers
dinoroo
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:49 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by dinoroo »

I spent some time trying to fix the soundfont issues I've been having (choppy, unnatural sound... not the skipping midi note issue). It seems that if the decay and sustain settings in the soundfont are left blank (as they are in many soundfonts), the issue persists. On the soundfonts I tested so far (only 2), if I change the decay setting to 0.001 and the sustain to 100%, the issue goes away. I'm doing this both on the VCA and VCF envelopes, and also changing the release time on the VCF envelope to 60 sec. This all makes me wonder what settings MTS is using as default if those fields are left blank? Since I don't see this problem in BS-16i, I think that may be the difference between playing soundfonts in the two apps.
Support
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Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

dinoroo wrote:It seems that if the decay and release settings in the soundfont are left blank (as they are in many soundfonts), the issue persists.
I've been looking at release settings myself, and I noticed some soundfonts don't specify any values indeed. That's rather weird actually: the default value is 1 millisecond according to the SF2 specs, which is extremely low.

I haven't looked at decay or sustain settings yet, thanks for the suggestion.
dinoroo wrote:the skipping midi note issue
This should be fixed in the next release.


Giel Bremmers
dinoroo
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:49 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by dinoroo »

Thanks Giel;

I corrected my last post (must have wrote it before my morning coffee):
dinoroo
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:49 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by dinoroo »

Now that I've had more time to play around with soundfont settings, I don't believe my last post was correct. I took the same soundfont using the settings above, and then blanked out all of the fields except for the release time and tried them both. They both played fine (the same) in MTS.
Support
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Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2004 2:17 pm

Re: skipping/cutting off midi notes during playback (soundfo

Post by Support »

Thanks for the update.


Giel Bremmers
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