Piano Booster with multiple keyboards (wishlist)

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

I've got PB connected to a Yamaha HC-4 organ and an external sound generator, and thought it worth commenting that 0.6.4's "separate hands" facility works very well with it. However, I wonder whether I might take the liberty of making an observation.

The organ's upper manual appears on MIDI as channel 1, PB maps this nicely onto the treble clef. The organ's lower manual and pedalboard appear as channel 2 and 3 respectively, PB appears to merge these onto the bass clef.

However, it is very easy for the bass clef to extend beyond the bottom of the lower manual, it's obviously possible to use the pedalboard for the extra few notes but what would be really useful would be a way of shifting the lower manual by an octave (or an integer number of octaves): it might be that newer instruments can do this in the keyboard but mine can't.

At which point I suppose that I have to add that an extra clef for the pedalboard would be a pretty smooth thing to have, again with a shift facility. However I don't know how many actual or potential PB users are using organ-style manuals rather than a flat keyboard.

-- MarkMLl

[Louis B.]

Yes the octave shift thing I want to do for some time as well as the bass parts are fun to play. I will do this after Xmas.

A third stave would be v. difficult so is unlikely.

PB accepts piano input from all channels (including 1,2,3) and maps the output on two free midi channels. One for the right sound and the other for the wrong sound. is this causing you a problem?

L.

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Louis B. wrote

PB accepts piano input from all channels (including 1,2,3) and maps the output on two free midi channels. One for the right sound and the other for the wrong sound. is this causing you a problem?

No problem at all. I was looking at it from the POV of the keyboard/pedalboard channels- it would still be nice to be able to do something useful with them even if there wasn't a visible clef.

-- MarkMLl

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Just a note to say that I've been working through the code and I think I can see how to add support for multiple input channels (i.e. for a two manual organ plus possibly a pedalboard) each with an appropriate octave shift. I'll try and hack something when I get the time but I'll probably need help with the user interface- I don't know Qt and don't really have time to investigate.

-- MarkMLl

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

Just a note to say that I've been working through the code and I think I can see how to add support for multiple input channels (i.e. for a two manual organ plus possibly a pedalboard) each with an appropriate octave shift. I'll try and hack something when I get the time but I'll probably need help with the user interface- I don't know Qt and don't really have time to investigate.

I find that a usable hack to handle e.g. an organ with multiple manuals is to use MIDI-OX with a map file to transpose one or more of them to get the range needed. The output from MIDI-OX is fed to MIDI Yoke which is installed as a driver, Piano Booster gets its input from MIDI Yoke.

The trick here is to get MIDI-OX working with the appropriate transposition, stop it, start PB and then finally start MIDI-OX. This is because PB insists on having its designated channel available, while MIDI-OX tries to grab all channels but will honour any previous claims gracefully.

This works adequately, and is allowing me- as an example- to use midi29825_Bad-Penny-Blues.mid (I forget where I found this) as a training piece. However the distribution of notes between bass and treble clef isn't very good: it would be useful to have some way of forcing the bass and melody onto separate clefs even if this meant using artificial ledger lines.

-- MarkMLl