Re: A question of rendering multiple instances of \arpeggio in MIDI

[Thomas Morley]

Am Fr., 16. Apr. 2021 um 06:01 Uhr schrieb Petr Pařízek
<petrparizek2000@yahoo.com>:
>
> Hello,
>
> originally I wanted to ask two questions but I'll leave my second
> question for a different thread so that the two topics don't get mixed up.
> I currently use LilyPond 2.22 on my Windows machine.
> Via simple web search, I was trying to find some info on the possibility
> of rendering arpeggios in MIDI files. What I found was an older
> discussion (I don't remember the URL) from which it seemed to me that
> such a feature was actually not planned to be implemented, even though
> many other kinds of performance markings could be rendered in the MIDI
> file via the "articulate" script.
> My question is: Is my understanding correct that implementing such a
> feature would, in one way or another, be troublesome and that doing so
> is not considered a good idea? Or is the reason something else?
> I'm asking because I can name at least 4 different ways in which this
> feature would help me tremendously:
> - 1) I'm blind. Therefore, if I want to make sheet music available to
> other people, MIDI files are the one and only way I can locate typos in
> my .ly file (an invaluable feature, numerous times has it helped me spot
> really serious errors in my input text!). If I could render the
> arpeggios in the MIDI file similarly to rendering ornamentation or
> accents or other stuff, I could then easily check whether I have indeed
> used a \arpeggio at the particular spot or not.
> - 2) If this were possible, I wouldn't have to manually turn all the
> arpeggios into written-out notes while repeatedly switching
> \tieWaitForNote on and off. Doing something like this is time-consuming
> even for one single arpeggio because it can't easily be automated.
> Therefore if my score contains more than 30 of them, I don't even try to
> imagine how much time it would take. And I may easily forget to do that
> at one spot if there are so many of them. In contrast, introducing a
> dedicated feature might allow me to just enclose the whole portion into
> braces.
> - 3) If I ever wanted to turn my modified .ly file back to one that's
> more appropriate for printing, I would just remove the dedicated command
> and the braces and leave the music fragment unchanged.
> - 4) If I have good-quality samples available for playing back the MIDI
> file, then the MIDI file can serve as a handy tool not just for spotting
> errors but also for making serious recordings. For a blind person, this
> is an important point because currently there doesn't seem to be any
> other software that would A) run under Windows, B) use some syntax whose
> verbosity is minimal, and C) make meaningful MIDI files. I mean, well,
> there's Scala, but Scala's "sequence" format is much much more verbose
> than what LilyPond offers. And what's more, I think I've read somewhere
> in the documentation that LilyPond even allows me to include a series of
> controller messages in my MIDI file, which can definitely make the
> resulting performance sound a lot better still.
>
> Thank you in advance for your answers or comments.
>
> Petr
>
>
> --
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>
>
Hi Petr,

you once started a thread on -user, my final reply (based on the work
by H. S. Teoh) was:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2020-12/msg00052.html
What's wrong with it?

Cheers,
  Harm