Midi Player - auto-instrument selection

[DeltaDio]

The midi-2-wave rendering when previewing/auditing midi files is already an awesome feature of the Resonic Player, although I must admit I have yet to hone my WAVE interpretation skills, at this point I can't deduce too many useful bits of information just looking at a musical wave shape or pattern.

The midi files browsed within the Resonic player are 'sonically rendered' i.e. played, by means of a MIDI voice engine (ResonicGM) that uses a piano (sound) for all midi files, this is the case for most midi players whilst playing (let's call them) single instrument files as opposed to MIDI song files with various instruments on different MIDI channels. Often a piano is a far cry of the intended instrument for a particular midi file, pianofied drums are bit silly and for instance bass or pad sequences rendered through a piano are reduced to a sound shape that requires a fair bit of brain power to mentally translate that 'caricature' of a sound into a decent bass or pad sound etc.

Wouldn't it be great if the MIDI player was able to choose a different GM instrument based on the properties of a midi file? I am not very familiar with the MIDI syntax so I don't know whether it is possible to easily establish if a file has timbric or non-timbric content and for example a drum loop can be easily discerned from a bass loop, synth lead etc. Often the file names themselves offer some clues: 08 F riff.mid, 14 G# pad.mid, ETM5 4-4 Kick Drum.mid, ETM5 Snare Roll 01.mid etc. Perhaps an algorithm that interprets file names, embedded meta info, MIDI syntax and wave shapes, and guesses the most fitting GM MIDI instrument, obviously with the option to just have piano as default.

If this sounds too ambitious I am thinking of a manual tagging feature so as to categorize a midi file with attributes like 'instrument type' and then having the option to have files tagged so and so played with a particular GM Midi instrument. Let's not make the suggestion that Resonic Player itself could perhaps have a simple synth for midi rendering...

Ideal would be to have a feature that would export midi files to audio files using the best fitting MIDI instrument and storing all (meta) info of that file into a DB with the possibility of browsing/searching/auditioning (previously 'parsed') midi files.

I know most of these tasks you could perform within a DAW, but I would like to curate thousands and thousands of purchased MIDI files that I am allowed to use ('royalty free') but because auditioning them all is a pain most remain unknown and unused...

Update: I have now discovered some more features of the Resonic Player like the filter function (so for instance I could only select bass midi files in a particular folder and autoplay them) and I have also seen you could select a different bank than the default ResonicGM. Would it be possible to find or configure a bank that is suited for bass files, a different one for pads etc. ?

[Tom]

Hey there. We've had this on the todo list for a long time, and you perfectly described how this is, and should be done!

Wouldn't it be great if the MIDI player was able to choose a different GM instrument based on the properties of a midi file? I am not very familiar with the MIDI syntax so I don't know whether it is possible to easily establish if a file has timbric or non-timbric content and for example a drum loop can be easily discerned from a bass loop, synth lead etc.

That's not easily doable, or in any way doable that makes sense. I've looked at a lot of examples taken from sample CDs and it really blows my mind when sample CD producers call their files "34.mid" with no program changes or indications inside, a directory name called "Midis", and it's actually a pad loop, or a drum loop, or a solo bass line.

Often the file names themselves offer some clues: 08 F riff.mid, 14 G# pad.mid, ETM5 4-4 Kick Drum.mid, ETM5 Snare Roll 01.mid etc. Perhaps an algorithm that interprets file names, embedded meta info, MIDI syntax and wave shapes, and guesses the most fitting GM MIDI instrument, obviously with the option to just have piano as default.

We're basically already doing this. While our auto-tagging system (in the works, already partially testable in Alphas) would be very helpful here I believe for MIDI files a separate, tiny, dumb string matching system would make more sense. I'll look into solutions here.

Would it be possible to find or configure a bank that is suited for bass files, a different one for pads etc. ?

No, because that doesn't affect the instrument being played. The default bank has 128 instruments in it already.

Drop by our Discord and get my attention, we might have some tests in the next Alpha.