Klarinet Archive - Posting 000295.txt from 2005/02

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Help with MIDI?
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:47:54 -0500


Ormond Montoya wrote,

>I and a friend are exchanging music (music that
>we wrote ourselves, not recordings). Since we
>use different music programs which don't understand
>each other, we tried saving our scores as MIDI files
>and then attaching the MIDI files to emails.
>
>Neither of us has received anything that even _remotely_
>resembles what the other person sent.
>
>While I'm simplifying the details a bit, because neither
>of us is writing a solo, nevertheless I had assumed that
>MIDI is basically a universal language. That is, while
>a clarinet might sound a bit different on my MIDI player
>program than it does on some other MIDI player program,
>at least it would be recognizable as a clarinet on both
>players. But no, the MIDI of a clarinet sounds like piano
>played staccato on one MIDI player program, and it sounds
>like an oboe played legato on another MIDI player program.
>
>Can someone give me a clue about what's going on?

The more time-consuming suggestion I sent to Bill by private mail earlier
(I'm one of the people with whom he's corresponding) was to open new
instrument staves in Sibelius, move the music into them, then erase the
original staves. Then I realized there's a simpler way--and this is also
how to sort out stackups, where you've added new instruments to the score
but some of them have no playback because the program dumped all the new
instruments together into the same MIDI slot (a bug in Sibelius 2 that may
have been corrected in 3):

Open the file in Sibelius, and save it as a Sibelius file. Go to the tool
bar up at the top of the screen, open >Windows, and in that window, open
>Mixer. At the bottom of each track bar on the left, you'll see a number.
Click on the number. A window to the right will tell you which instrument
is playing in that track. (In my version of this particular file, there
are two tracks for each staff.) Go to the instrument window in that same
panel and convert all of them to clarinet (General MIDI sound 71 works for
everything in the clarinet family) or to whatever instrument they're
supposed to be. If your Sibelius 3 works the same as my Sibelius 2,
*don't* then click on "Reset sounds," because that will reset them right
back to what they were originally. After you change all the settings
manually, close the window. The tracks should play back (and can be
re-labelled) as what they were intended to be. You will still have to
hand-replace the slurs and other dynamic markings, because as MIDI
commands, they won't play back properly. Hope this helps....

Lelia Loban
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