Re: [fluid-dev] Re: MIDI Standard Specs

[Chris Moeller]

Hello, I realize this post is approaching two years old, but I just
happened to revisit it from a link while browsing the FluidSynth source
code. I noticed it before, but didn't think to respond to it until I
actually noticed something relevant while tweaking the defaults.

David Henningsson said:
>  That change is now committed. Also this means that the standard reverb
>  level is 40 instead of 0. However, I was unable to notice that it made
>  any difference compared to what it was before, so I'm a little bit
>  puzzled over that - do you notice any difference, or did I miss
>  something...?

You may not have noticed a difference because the current modulator send
amount for reverb (and chorus) send level controls is 200, which equates
to 20% for the maximum level of 127. So, a default level of 40 would be
about 6.3%. That's not very much.

I'm not sure what an appropriate send amount would be, but at least one
open source implementation, TiMidity++, sends relative to the wet mix
level of the current reverb preset, so I guess that would be 100%. It
certainly adds a more noticeable level of reverb to the songs I have
which actually use the reverb send level. Also on the files I have which
do not set the reverb send level, if I set the default to 40 like the XG
specification states.

I'm not sure if I should enable that last part in a hard coded manner in
my MIDI player, as some people may not like it. I don't recall receiving
any complaints on the (foobar2000) forum regarding my component not having
enough reverb, but I may receive complaints about it having too much if I
enable such an override by default.


-Chris M.