[Coco] General Midi was Drivewire VHD's

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 9:54 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
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>
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> If you could share this knowledge, either by making new DW filters for
> hese keyboards, editing the existing ones to be more correct,  or
> ven as a simple list of "this instrument # should be changed to that
> nstrument #", then we could really improve the automatic translation.
> Failing that, I can just compare the results of your conversion to the
> riginal if that's OK, but seems like doing it the hard way.
>
> The whole reason General Midi was concieved was cross campatability on all Midi capable machines. Let's say I download a Ultimuse file composed on >a Casio CZ-101 from a website, then I use Ulitmuse's "save to Midi" function (it dos have one) then I transfer this file to my PC then to a CD to give to a >friend for him to use. Not being into Cocos, Drivewire or Ultimuse... he would know nothing of our "filters" and the song would sound completely wrong on >his machine. Now if the file was in GM to start with... I could play it n ANY Midi player and it would be correct. The only difference would be the quality of >sounds from machine to machine based on the quality of the soundcard and Midi sound engine. But the sounds would be the same. A piano would be a >piano, a trumpet, a trumpet and so on.
>
> As for making filters for drivewire... that would be easy, if I wanted to research about 19 or 20 vintage synth manuals and wade through the midi spec of
> each and HOPE they have an instrument list (some don't, it's not part of the old Midi spec, another reason GM is standard) then the filter would be the

Ok.. I got the impression you already know what these translations are
supposed to be.  You mention it only takes 5 minutes to swap out the
tracks in a song.. wouldn't those same 5 minutes let you make a list
that could be used to translate every song containing those
instruments automatically from then on?  Or am I missing something?

As a long time (very amateur) keyboard player, I understand general
MIDI, why it exists and how it came to be.  The reason I am interested
in creating filters to translate from the encodings commonly used in
music of the CoCo era to today's modern general midi spec is that I
want to listen to the creations of artists from that time period as
accurately as I can with a reasonable amount of effort.

It is useful to me, and I would assume anyone else interested in
hearing this music, to be able to download some random disks full of
cmf or ume or whatever files from some random collection of CoCo
stuff, just hit play, and get *reasonable* results.  I understand that
perfection is impossible without having the original synth or some
emulator, but thats OK.

Very few of us are going to just know how to translate sounds from a
particular synth into general midi, and even fewer are going to bother
to do it.   This means that all the content sitting there in those
CoCo archives is essentially not accessible.  However, if its just a
matter of playing the thing and picking the right translation out of a
menu, then for me at least it becomes an enjoyable way to spend a few
hours instead of a useless collection of bytes.  There is a lot of
great stuff created on the CoCo that just isn't easy to explore
without such a tool.

So, long story short, any info you have that can be used to improve
the existing profiles or to create new ones would be much appreciated.
 The examples I provided cover the most common synths I see used in
CoCo stuff (like the yamaha pss480, very strange cheap FM beast that
was quite popular, but good luck guessing what any of those voices
really sound like! ).   However, like I said these included profiles
are just guesses based on the one or two word description of the voice
in the synth's manual.  They are undoubtedly inaccurate, but they can
usually make things that sound ridiculous sound mostly like music.
I'd love to make these translations more accurate and add new
translations for other content that people are likely to find in our
collective archives of CoCo content.