Re: [Swami-devel] Re: [iiwusynth-devel] RE: Hi - Very quiet list - my first post

[Peter Hanappe]

Chris Cannam wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 January 2003 21:46, Peter Hanappe wrote:
>
> > When you load several SoundFonts, the banks and presets of the
> > lastly loaded file can mask the banks and presets of previously
> > loaded files. It works like a stack. I guess that's the problem you
> > ran into.
>
>
> Yes, I had formerly assumed that it simply didn't work with more than 
> one SoundFont but your post led me to jump to the optimistic 
> conclusion that it might be doing some clever stuff that allowed it 
> to map (say) two GM bank-zero-plus-percussion SoundFonts onto one 
> MIDI device, if only I knew how to get at the results.   Mostly just 
> a misunderstanding on my part, though it'd be very nice if it could 
> do that sort of magic.

You could see a SoundFont as a sort of "database" of presets. The index
into the database to find a presets is the couple
(bank-number, preset-number).
If you load two soundfonts and both contain, say preset (0,0), then
there's a conflict. Currently, the last one loaded is the visible one.
Like I said, I believe the SBLive works that way, too. That's annoying
because as you say most GM SoundFont put all presets in bank 0. There
are two things we could do. First, automagically offset bank numbers by
the offset of the SoundFont on the stack. In that case, preset (0,0)
will become preset (1,0) when a new soundfont is loaded. Second, let the
user specify an offset of the bank numbers of the soundfont when it's
loaded. We could do both. I don't have a precise opinion about this so
let me know what you think. In any case, it's not very hard to
implement (me think).

Cherries,
Peter