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Re: MIDI channels


From: Martin Tarenskeen
Subject: Re: MIDI channels
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:00:17 +0100 (CET)
User-agent: Alpine 2.02 (LFD 1266 2009-07-14)



On Wed, 21 Mar 2012, David Kastrup wrote:

For this purpose I need to write a pianotune that uses MIDI channel 3 for
the Left Hand part, and MIDI channel 4 for the Right Hand part. A bit
strange, I agree, but this is what the PianoBooster docs tell me to do.

Well since Lilypond enumerates the MIDI channels as they are needed, you could simply produce a MIDI score that has one empty staff, thus pushing the other staves one channel down. (The first channel is used by lilypond itself).

P.S: Not true? The first TRACK is used by LilyPond, not the first CHANNEL.
The first MIDI channel goes to the first staff containing music. Read on:

That's one of the things I tried, but doesn't work.

I have discovered Lilypond only creates a new MIDI channel if a Staff
contains music.

Put music there, then.  Just s should suffice.

That's what I thought.
I have tried {}, {s}, {r}, {R}, but they all don't do the trick. Channel 1 is still assigned to the first staff that has notes in it.

Only if I create two staffs with at least one single note, MIDI channel 3 goes to the next staff. You can try and check yourself.

I can understand why Lilypond behaves like this. Lilypond only supports 16 MIDI channels. Some people have already posted problems in this forum with this limitation when writing big orchestral scores. Just search in the mail archives. It would not be very efficient to assign MIDI channels to staffs that won't play any music anyway.

Don't change this behaviour just for my little private project!
I have found another solution (using abcm2ps and abc2midi) that does what I want to do. But I still think this is an interesting case and would be interested in a workaround for LilyPond.

--

MT





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