Aifel's Maestro upgrades

[palantorio]

The Idea of doubling and transposing is nice.. but maybe not doubling and only transposing parts of the tracks.. usually you do this with Anvil..

Another Idea i have is : Usually the rattles in the Drumparts are way too loud so you make two drums.. one with rattles and very quiet and one Drum with Bass,Toms etc and make i loud ( very loud )..
Is it possible if you have ONLY one drumpart in the Midi and you want only ONE part in the ABC to adjust the volumes of the rattles and toms .. you can only adjust the volumes of the whole drums not of every single druminstrument.

[Splik]

Is it possible if you have ONLY one drumpart in the Midi and you want only ONE part in the ABC to adjust the volumes of the rattles and toms .. you can only adjust the volumes of the whole drums not of every single druminstrument.

That will in most cases not work nicely.

Problem is: if for example you have a 4/4 measure with say Rattle every beat and Bass every second beat. Then you increase volume of Bass and decrease it for Rattle.
What will happen is that the 2 Bass sounds will have increased volume, but so will the 2 Rattles that start at the same time as the Bass. So the 4 Rattles will have uneven volume, 2 of them will have same high volume as the bass and the other 2 will the lower volume you designated for Rattle.

This is a limitation in lotro, all notes that start at the same time is grouped in chords (also drum), and they have to share volume. And Maestro just picks the loudest.

The best solution is the one you already use; to have 2 drums. That also gives you benefit of for example have Bass full volume on first drum, and then have Bass again in the second drum with Rattles also, at lower volume. That way you get lower volume rattles plus bass sounds that is louder than max volume. Is also how I do it for some songs.

[Splik]

Version 2.5.0.69 has been released at usual link. It features the octave doubling and a bugfix.

[Splik]

I am now working on better triplet/swing timing handling when such notes is mixed in with even notes in same song. For example drums doing triplets for a couple of measures, while flute continue doing even notes.
I call this feature Mix Timings, will be an optional checkbox.

Below is an example result.

This is the input that I made the midi from: (Thanks to Jersiel for making the initial piano staff)


And this is the result:



I am very happy with it so far.
Notice how normal can handle a 4th triplet but ruins the timing for the 8th triplet, it also semi-fails the 4th sextuplet probably due to it being less legato than the 4th triplet (if you look close you will see the gaps between the sextuplet MIDI notes are not the same as the 4th triplet).
Triplet/swing setting on the other hand can handle them fine, but fails the 16th and 32nd notes, the swing timing is spot on while normal swing was not so precise.
As for Mix Timings, it handles 16ths, 32nds, triplets, sextuplet and swing as good as I could wish for. Didn't really expect it to handle the nonuplet gracefully, but it's also not catastrophic, still better than either normal or with swing/triplet checkbox.
Another thing to notice is that Mix Timings seem to produce same result with triplet/swing checkbox on and off. That is only because this input is so simple, you will still have to make a good judgement whether you want it on or off as before.

It gets harder when there is tempo changes in the mix, around those it revert to whatever the triplet/swing checkbox is set to. And that is also what it defaults to when it cannot decide if a group of notes is even or not. So this feature will not make the triplet/swing checkbox obsolete.

[Splik]

Version 2.5.0.71 has been released.

Changes:
Mix Timings checkbox added.
Fixed that after loading a Maestro Project from .msx file, existing drum-parts would not instantly update the preview audio when individual drum notes were changed.


The drum change is something that has bothered me for years, glad I found the cause.

The Mix Timings is by far the most significant change I have made to Maestro.
Advice: Enable it always, unless you plan to do post-export ABC editing, see more details in the changelog text file.


Friendly reminder: I really really recommend that you do not use abc files as masters, unless you no longer have access to the orig MIDI. If you want to change some stuff in a song you made, best option is to do it with a saved Maestro Project using original MIDI or start from scratch with a MIDI. There are several reasons for this; timings can be shifted a bit if used delay on the abc, student FX will not be editable, transposed out of range notes cannot be recovered, octave doubling cannot be undone, some volume changes cannot undone etc. etc.

[Splik]

No rest for the wicked, I made a couple of improvements I hope.

- Octave doubling will now show visually in the notegraph also. This is helpful for evaluating out of range notes.
- Less interruptions in very long sustained notes.
- Improved Mix Timings algorithm near tempo-changes.
- For drum parts, Mix Timings will now only use note start times, not end times for evaluating rhythm.

Here is download links if you would like to preview next version:

[Links removed] as it has been released in usual link (see first post).

[Splik]

Released 2.5.0.73

[Splik]

Released .74 and .75:

Version 2.5.0.75
- Fixed that a MIDI Note ON event after a Note ON for same pitch, would remove the first Note ON event if the second had non-zero velocity.

Version 2.5.0.74
- Mix Timings now no longer consider section silenced notes when determining rhythm.
- When a Lotro instrument part stop using a section edited track, also stop visualizing the section edits, even though it remembers them.
- Fix that when attempting to load a Maestro Project that has parts assigned to MIDI tracks that does no longer exist in the MIDI,
Maestro would sometimes give the user no feedback on why it does not open. It was due to flooding of whitespaces to main Maestro window,
which forced the important message out of view.


The Note ON bug, has degraded several songs for me. I couldn't understand why the MIDI played in Maestro would sound correct but the ABC preview and output would not.
I eventually decided to dig into how Maestro interprets MIDI signals, and found an edge case which was not treated correctly, hence some songs, would sometimes have missing the first note of unisons.
Anyway, fixed now.

[palantorio]

Released .74 and .75:

Version 2.5.0.75
- Fixed that a MIDI Note ON event after a Note ON for same pitch, would remove the first Note ON event if the second had non-zero velocity.

Version 2.5.0.74
- Mix Timings now no longer consider section silenced notes when determining rhythm.
- When a Lotro instrument part stop using a section edited track, also stop visualizing the section edits, even though it remembers them.
- Fix that when attempting to load a Maestro Project that has parts assigned to MIDI tracks that does no longer exist in the MIDI,
Maestro would sometimes give the user no feedback on why it does not open. It was due to flooding of whitespaces to main Maestro window,
which forced the important message out of view.


The Note ON bug, has degraded several songs for me. I couldn't understand why the MIDI played in Maestro would sound correct but the ABC preview and output would not.
I eventually decided to dig into how Maestro interprets MIDI signals, and found an edge case which was not treated correctly, hence some songs, would sometimes have missing the first note of unisons.
Anyway, fixed now.

Wow.. you are going very deep into the materia..
Ihave some ideas for the abc-player.. but i am not sure if you are willing to this.. (making playlists for concerts..etc)

[Splik]

Wow.. you are going very deep into the materia..
Ihave some ideas for the abc-player.. but i am not sure if you are willing to this.. (making playlists for concerts..etc)

I would like to hear your suggestions. You can write them here, or send a private message to me.

Playlist in abc-player? Do you mean like queue up a list of abc songs, to check that they sound good in that order, therefore is good for a concert set?

[palantorio]

I would like to hear your suggestions. You can write them here, or send a private message to me.

Playlist in abc-player? Do you mean like queue up a list of abc songs, to check that they sound good in that order, therefore is good for a concert set?

Yes and No .. i will tell more in the next days per PM .. ( i will have to draw and write a lot about what i really mean).. But first.. yes.. queue up a list of abc songs was my first thought.. but after 10 min of thinking about i had more and more ideas..

[palantorio]

PM sent ..

[Splik]

I have been digging more at how Maestro interprets MIDI files.
It treated all midis as GM type. So GS (Roland extension), XG (Yamaha extension) and GM2 (General MIDI v2) midis are actually treated as GM. And oh did I open a can of worms..
I have been coding in support for detecting those extension's drum/sfx stuff. There is actually many of those midis out there, especially XG.

What this wont do: It wont change how the playback of the MIDI sounds. It wont show you the true name of the instrument used when its not one of the regular 128 GM ones. But good news is that in most cases it will not far off from the GM standard instrument, for example it will say the standard "Bright Acoustic Piano" when its really a "Detuned Bright Piano".
What it will do: Show you which notes are drums/sfx belonging to the GS/XG/GM2 extension. Separate out extension drums from normal drums and note tracks.

Edit: I just made it able to show the true instrument.

This means that in some midis you will all of a sudden see more tracks at the bottom than was there before. You will see some tracks previously being melodic being flagged as drums tracks.

For me personally this has been important. I don't know if you have had this experience, but sometimes I would make a abc and one of the instruments like maybe a lonely mountain bassoon would sound totally off and not fit at all in the song. What really was going on was that it was playing drum/sfx sounds as melodic notes, result would of course be bad. Or some midis drum track would sound weak, as if half the drum sounds were missing, they were just in other tracks that were not marked as drum tracks.

Here is 5 examples:

Here a piano is being flagged as drum/sfx track.
Before:

After:


Here a piano and guitar tracks is being flagged as drums/sfx plus a new drum/sfx track is added with drum sounds from a track that had both notes and drums mixed.
Before:

After:


Here is an extreme example of a midi where melodic track was switched to drum and drum switched to melodic.
Before:

After:


Continued in next post..

[Splik]

..continued from previous post

Here a celesta track is being flagged as a drum/sfx track.
Before:

After:


The last is an interesting case. The old Maestro would take track 10 and 11 and pull out what it determined was drum notes and make new track (17) with those drum notes combined.
It would incorrectly think remaining notes in track 10 and 11 was strings.

However, the new Maestro will take what old Maestro thought was strings in track 10 and put them in new track (17) as a drum track (What they really is, is orchestra sounds. Most if not all are probably Roland Timpani, but not sure thats the case as the orchestra timpani from GS extension share the voice with other orchestra sounds. Note also the author of the midi has named track 10 as TIMPANI although there was non-timpani notes in it). As for track 11, new Maestro will separate what was drums on normal drum channel plus those from another channel and make another new track (18) that would contain those drums declared on another channel. This is done to make sure to make a new track, else old Maestro projects might not open in new Maestro as it will complain the midi is missing a track, as the old meastro thought track 11 was a mix of melodic and drum notes and separate and make new track.

So I had to make a compromise to make old Maestro Projects made on midis like this open. Ideally, the track name "TIMPANI" would be on track 17 now instead of 10.
I general recommend when/if using this new Maestro and opening old Projects using XG/GS midi files, to take a close look and verify that lotro instruments are assigned sensibly.
Note that GS/XG/GM2 Drums tracks don't necessarily use another drum kit than the standard GM kit.

Before:

After:


In the very last image notice the radio button "Original" now informs what kind the source MIDI is, in this case it will say (GS) for the Roland extension.

I plan on soon making a beta Maestro available with this GS/XG drum support.

PS. This version will also have an option to enable a counter for simultanious played notes. It will in some cases count too high for fast notes though, as Maestros release is greater than lotro's. I can remove the feature again, if people find it confusing, but it do not count lower. So you can be sure that if it says 45, there is MAX 45 notes playing at the same time at this point in the song.

[Splik]

Here is a BETA version of the above mentioned changes.

MSI:
Old beta link removed, see newer post

ZIP:
Old beta link removed, see newer post

[SchorschiSchrumpf]

It is very nice to see that you arrive at a lot of the conclusions I came to years ago

Like not exactly using the ending time of tones exactly and also asking folks to keep their MIDIs rather than to edit ABC files. In terms of keeping MIDI files you are fighting windmills though - the idea that lotro-ABC is a lossy format compared to the original MIDI I could only get across to very few people.

The final conclusion that you still have to come to is that you need to rewrite the entire ABC generation engine of Maestro and think of the problem of making the ABC rather as a sampling problem than a musical score with measures and so on.
To reach the real limit lotro-ABC provides you need to treat lotro-ABC like a flexible grid with a gridsize of minimally 50ms with tones having to be minimally 100ms long. All the grid-cells can also be an arbitrary amount of ms longer than 50ms ( like 51, 52 etc). Then all you need is the starting and ending times in milliseconds of all the tones and map them on that grid, while trying to set the grid-cell starting times to be as exact as possible. Afterwards resolve as many conflicts as possible without changing starting times, then do some nasty conflict resolution and then generate the ABC from that. That's how I did it with BruTE. If you do it like that all the rythm issues and tempo change issues will automatically resolve themselves.

Keep up the good work, you already did quite a good job on Maestro so far!

Bruzo

[Splik]

The final conclusion that you still have to come to is that you need to rewrite the entire ABC generation engine of Maestro and think of the problem of making the ABC rather as a sampling problem than a musical score with measures and so on.

I was toying with the idea actually.
But then I figured out an algorithm for what I called Mix Timings, and it works so well that I wont rewrite how Maestro translate timings.
It basically switches between 2 grids all the time, the size of the 2 grid depends on the tempo in currently in use, and the two grids met up precisely every couple of grid sections, to make sure everything is synced exact. These sections where I can flip the grid are very small, so the result is good. Whether to flip a small section, depends on note starts and note endings in that little section, I have an algorithm for that, it heavily favor note starts over note endings.

To reach the real limit lotro-ABC provides you need to treat lotro-ABC like a flexible grid

Yes, I looked at BruTE and did some tests of its output. You got the start timings of notes spot on whether triplets or whatever.
Note durations only had to suffer slightly, at least in the test-case I ran on it, although that's hard to notice when listening to it.
If I were to write Maestro from scratch I would maybe have done something very akin to BruTE.

Keep up the good work, you already did quite a good job on Maestro so far!

Thank you sir, I will.

[Splik]

I have polished some details since I posted the first beta links. Also corrected some handling of instrument names.

If you want to try out version 2.5.0.78 (still consider it Beta), here is the links:

[Beta links removed, see first post for regular releases.]

I am not final releasing it yet because it might slightly change some old projects made on GS, XG or GM2 midi files as I explained some posts ago. And I want to make sure it is done the right way and not rush it.

[Splik]

Alright, version 2.5.0.79 can be downloaded now.


Changelog:

- Added option to show polyphony count while previewing abc song.
- In the delay dialog the time can now be entered using comma as decimal point.
- In XG, GM2 or GS midis, drums tracks will no longer get assigned some random GM instrument voice.
    They will be named "XG Drums", "GM2 Drums" or "GS Drums", and might still some times still sound wrong when playing the midi.
    But now at least they will be marked as drum track so people don't assign melodic instruments on them.
- Added support for showing GS, XG and GM2 instrument and drum kit names. If it does not know the name then it fall back to GM name.
    Number of known instrument and kit names has gone from 129 to 2446 in total.
    The name lists was compiled mostly by github.com/jazz-soft and then edited and expanded by me.

[Hannariel]

Alright, version 2.5.0.79 can be downloaded now.

You are amazing!

[Hannariel]

Ohhhh, the next big thing would to be able to arrange for more than 14 parts! Kenghis (Mardi Gras Party) and Aedon (Old Winyards/Lonely Mountain Band) organized a classical music concert in Bree Park on Landroval this last Sunday and we had some people arrange 24 parts for our raid. Amazingly they were so well done and no dropped notes in game.

[Splik]

be able to arrange for more than 14 parts!

You guessed what I am working on.

I will be able to guarantee 15 parts. For more than that it will depend on the music and how you arrange it.

[Splik]

Released it, preview now has soft limit of 15 instead of hard limit of 14.

[Hannariel]

Released it, preview now has soft limit of 15 instead of hard limit of 14.

This is great. I was able to get to 18 parts before I got a warning. Now, onward to 24!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I so appreciate all of the work you have put into this! You are phenomenal.

[SchorschiSchrumpf]

This is great. I was able to get to 18 parts before I got a warning. Now, onward to 24!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I so appreciate all of the work you have put into this! You are phenomenal.

The issue with the more than 15 parts is the midi engine and the limit of classical midis to 16 voices ( one is only drums ).
I think Splik would have to find another midi engine for Maestro to get around that issue.

@Splik: there could be a way to mix down all the ABC tracks into a single Midi0 track with a lot of instrument changes

Also: there is that tone limit of 64 simultanious sounds in the game .. you need a note counter to warn ppl if their huge arrangements have too many tones, it'll create lags and missing tones when played in the game.

edit: the other issue is if you split it into 2 midis then there is always the problem that a lot of midi editors skip the breaks in the beginning and the two files are not synchronous anymore