Disklavier

Joan,

I got your kids songs and tried to play them with my file player. Your files all use note off events instead of note on with velocity 0 to turn them off. This is unusual although legal MIDI. What is most strange is that the velocity in the note off message varies and is not 0. I have never seen this before. It may be some way of encoding aftertouch with which I am not familiar.

In order to get my players to work with your files I simply convert the note off vel xxx to note on vel 0 and they play fine. I am pleased that I discovered this and made the change to my player so it will handle this use of MIDI that I never considered. However I would like to know why these files are made that way. Did you do it intentionally? Were they recorded on a Disklavier? Any other information would be helpful.

I probably never had this problem before because I never wrote a file player and all of my previous programs treated note off messages differently. I needed to make my processing loop as tight as possible for the player and simplified the note event parsing. 

It is great that you have these kids songs. I support anything that encourages kids musically. It would be even better if they had lyrics. Do you have any intention of adding them? 

--
Best regards,
Spencer_Lists Chase        mailto:lists@...
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
Garberville, CA 95542  Postal service only.
Laytonville, CA 95454  UPS only.
Lists@spencerserolls(dot)com
http://www(dot)spencerserolls.com 
replace (dot) with a .
(707) 984-8356

Good morning, everyone.

On Sep 9, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Spencer_Lists wrote:

> Joan,
>
> I got your kids songs and tried to play them with my file player.  
> Your files all use note off events instead of note on with velocity  
> 0 to turn them off. This is unusual although legal MIDI. What is  
> most strange is that the velocity in the note off message varies and  
> is not 0. I have never seen this before. It may be some way of  
> encoding aftertouch with which I am not familiar....
>

I cannot comment on how Joan's files were made, but I can say that the  
Disklavier does use note-off messages instead of note-on with velocity  
0. This is important in the case of the models that actually measure  
the speed of the key release and use this information during playback.

Although I am not absolutely certain, I think that all Disklavier  
models that do not measure release velocity generate note-off with  
velocity of 64 when the key is released.

It seems to me that note-off with a velocity of 0 is a meaningless  
concept, but I think that it is a legal message.

Regards,
PianoBench

I gathered these off the internet in the midi form.  They seem to work
on my Mark IV.  I did have to set the piano part Ch right and Ch left
for a few of those that were not set.  Some of these are good and some
are very simple in structure.  Just thought they would be nice for
grandkids and small kids that might be interested in singing some
simple songs and might give them an interest in the piano.

As far as the lyrics, there is an option in MidiSwing (software
available on the Mac) to import lyrics, but I was not sure which
format the file containing the lyrics needed to be.

Joan


 to  --- In disklavier@yahoogroups.com, "George F. Litterst"
<PianoBench@...> wrote:

>
> Good morning, everyone.
> 
> On Sep 9, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Spencer_Lists wrote:
> 
> > Joan,
> >
> > I got your kids songs and tried to play them with my file player.  
> > Your files all use note off events instead of note on with velocity  
> > 0 to turn them off. This is unusual although legal MIDI. What is  
> > most strange is that the velocity in the note off message varies and  
> > is not 0. I have never seen this before. It may be some way of  
> > encoding aftertouch with which I am not familiar....
> >
> 
> I cannot comment on how Joan's files were made, but I can say that the  
> Disklavier does use note-off messages instead of note-on with velocity  
> 0. This is important in the case of the models that actually measure  
> the speed of the key release and use this information during playback.
> 
> Although I am not absolutely certain, I think that all Disklavier  
> models that do not measure release velocity generate note-off with  
> velocity of 64 when the key is released.
> 
> It seems to me that note-off with a velocity of 0 is a meaningless  
> concept, but I think that it is a legal message.
> 
> Regards,
> PianoBench
>

Greetings Joan,

I have a mac but am not very proficient with it and do not have MidiSwing.

If a MIDI file has note events perfectly to the bar and if the lyrics are hyphenated perfectly (one single beat error or hyphenation error or trying to do it with a hand played MIDI will screw up the synchronization) automatic importing of lyrics could work. I am mainly interested in adding lyrics to piano roll emulations many of which are either hand played or edited so you can not expect the notes to fall precisely on beats.

I have a little time today and was actually going to try writing a program to add lyrics that works from a hyphenated text file but uses a keyboard key to do the synchronizing instead of trying to do it automatically.

Does anyone else have interest in this? I'll put a little more effort into it and make it more sophisticated if it is for more than my use alone. The initial idea is to use a text file with one line per measure. This is the way most that you find on the internet are formatted. Automatic hyphenation is somewhat difficult but there are modules to do that and I might be able to add that feature at some point.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008, 8:42:58 AM, you wrote:
> I gathered these off the internet in the midi form. They seem to work
> on my Mark IV. I did have to set the piano part Ch right and Ch left
> for a few of those that were not set. Some of these are good and some
> are very simple in structure. Just thought they would be nice for
> grandkids and small kids that might be interested in singing some
> simple songs and might give them an interest in the piano.

> As far as the lyrics, there is an option in MidiSwing (software
> available on the Mac) to import lyrics, but I was not sure which
> format the file containing the lyrics needed to be.

> Joan

> to --- In disklavier@yahoogroups.com, "George F. Litterst"
> <PianoBench@...> wrote:

>> Good morning, everyone.

>> On Sep 9, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Spencer_Lists wrote:

>> > Joan,
>> >
>> > I got your kids songs and tried to play them with my file player. 
>> > Your files all use note off events instead of note on with velocity 
>> > 0 to turn them off. This is unusual although legal MIDI. What is 
>> > most strange is that the velocity in the note off message varies and 
>> > is not 0. I have never seen this before. It may be some way of 
>> > encoding aftertouch with which I am not familiar....
>> >

>> I cannot comment on how Joan's files were made, but I can say that the 
>> Disklavier does use note-off messages instead of note-on with velocity 
>> 0. This is important in the case of the models that actually measure 
>> the speed of the key release and use this information during playback.

>> Although I am not absolutely certain, I think that all Disklavier 
>> models that do not measure release velocity generate note-off with 
>> velocity of 64 when the key is released.

>> It seems to me that note-off with a velocity of 0 is a meaningless 
>> concept, but I think that it is a legal message.

>> Regards,
>> PianoBench


>  

-- 
Best regards,
Spencer_Lists Chase        mailto:lists@...
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
Garberville,  CA 95542    Postal service only.
Laytonville, CA 95454    UPS only.
Lists@spencerserolls(dot)com
http://www(dot)spencerserolls.com 
replace (dot) with a .
(707) 984-8356