Links to useful posts and documentation

[Jim Henry]

As the Miditzer has developed over the years, a lot of useful tidbits have been scattered throughout the Forum. This topic contains a brief description of these topics and links to the posts. Beginners do not need to concern themselves with any of this at first. These are topics that may be of help as you start to move beyond Base Camp and grow your Miditzer organ into something more than the basic on-screen organ.There is a page of documentation at the main VirtualOrgan.com site that serves as the Miditzer Help page. There is a prominant link to that page on the home page of Virtual Organ.com. It is a good idea to have a look at that page once you have the Miditzer running to at least get some idea of the additional information available.The Miditzer has been designed to be easy to get going and enjoy. Don't make things harder than they are. You can do some amazing things with the Miditzer and many people have. Just proceed in a step by step fashion and you can have a lot of fun with the Miditzer.

[Jim Henry]

Setting the MIDI Output Device
(or Why you should not set the MIDI Output Device)

WARNING
You should not set the MIDI output device to something other than FluidSynth unless you know exactly what you are doing.

In general, do not play with the "Set all MIDI output devices" box circled here or the individual "MIDI output device" highlighted in yellow:

Output Device Settings.png

The "Set all" box is just a shortcut for setting all the individual MIDI output devices and it will always be blank when you open this window because it does not represent a real setting that can be displayed.

The default, as shown, has all the individual MIDI outputs directed to the FluidSynth soft synthesizer that is included with the Miditzer. The Miditzer will take care of setting up FluidSynth with the right sound font to produce the theatre organ sounds you expect.

If you change the MIDI output device to anything other than FluidSynth, things quickly become complicated because most MIDI output devices do not understand sound fonts and they won't produce the theatre organ sounds you are expecting. The easiest alternatives for MIDI output devices are a Creative sound card with sound font support or the GigaStudio Orchestra soft synthesizer. In either case, you then have to take responsibility for setting up those synthesizers with the right sounds.

You can use the MIDI output device settings to do some pretty advanced things like playing real pipes with the Miditzer. However, you have to understand the MIDI messages that appear in the Miditzer's MIDI output and be able to set up the MIDI device that you send those messages to so you get the right sounds from those messages. This takes more than a casual understanding of MIDI.

[moonskin]

Hi everyone

Since I'm currently unable to do any physical work on my console (since I'm 3 weeks post a triple bypass and recovering well) I've at last got around to starting some documentation. It seems that one piece that is missing is an actual help file on the Miditzer Settings dialog. The help section on the web is great for almost everything else and advanced stuff should be left to the forum IMO so I've made a start.

This is very "first draft" and any suggestions or help would be welcome.

I've created it as a .chm help file just to keep the size down for now and it is yet to be indexed (obviously). You'll need to unzip it. If folk want to be involved in editing, I'll look at whether I can set up a little wiki.

Miditzer Settings.chm.zip

====================== from Jim Henry
If ever I hope "better late than never" applies, it is for this PDF version of Graham's Miditzer Settings documentation:

Miditzer Settings.pdf

[bdalton]

Hi Graham,
Sorry to hear about your need for a serious operation, I hope you'll be back to full strength soon.

I,ve downloaded the draft settings tutorial, but after unziping I'm having trouble finding an application to read it with, on my Vista Home Basic PC. Advice or other format to download would be gratefully received.

Cheers,
Barry

[WERSI-Tifoso]

Graham,

best wihes for a speedy recovery and thanks for investing energy in such a helpfull document. It came just in time for a friend who just started with the implementation of Miditzer...

I could open the zip document.

@Barry: the software is titled Executable Microsoft HTML Help File
. It came along with Vista Home Premium.

Hope this helps.

Hartmut

[bdalton]

Hartmut,
Thanks for the tip, but:-
I have "HTML Help Workshop" app on my machine,but using this just produces valid text among rubbish text.
The "Executable Microsoft HTML Help File" is no longer supported for Vista and ,as far as I can tell, is not downloadable from Microsoft.
I believe Microsoft considered .chm files to be a security risk.
Perhaps someone knows the full truth about this.

Cheers
Barry

[Jim Henry]

Perhaps this tip from http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/581253.aspx will help:

Right click on the file's properties and 'Unblock' the file so that the security block is bypassed:



This is not a global setting but specific to the particular help file. Once set Windows will display the help file properly and without any extra prompting for security. However, you have to do it to each file individually.

[Jim Henry]

Thanks for doing this Graham. I'm sure this will be helpful to a lot of users.

Some comments.

Input:

NOTE: The combination of device and channel must be unique for each clavier. (You can have all data coming in on the same device on different channels, or different devices on the same channel, or any other mixture as long as each combination of device and channel is unique.)

Actually not true. You can define two or more claviers to be the same and then a single input will activate all of them. This is useful if you have only one keyboard and want access to everything. You have to do this if you are using the keyboard split feature to get two Miditzer claviers out of a single keyboard.

(8) shows the note range and whether the incoming data is transposed. You will rarely need to alter this unless you need to transpose a keyboard.

I think what you want to say is "You will rarely need to alter this unless your keyboard sends transposed MIDI note data." You probably should add "or if you want to split your keyboard to have two Miditzer claviers controlled by different parts of one keyboard."

There probably should be a reference to the "Connecting Keyboards" document for more details of Input settings. There probably should be a reference to the keyboard splitting information that is somewhere.

Output:

(4) shows the MIDI channel that is carrying the data for that rank

Should be "sets the MIDI channel..." Likewise for 6 and 7, set pan and set bank and patch.

"Stps" should be "Stops".

Expression:

"Crescendo pedals if you they are MIDI capable" should be "Crescendo pedals if they are MIDI capable".

(3) shows the Clavier on which the data is entering Miditzer

Maybe
(3) sets the MIDI Device and MIDI Channel on which the Expression data is entering Miditzer by using the settings for the Clavier as set on the Input tab

"MIDIOx" should be "MIDI-OX".

Include a reference to the documentation we have for getting started with MIDI-OX?

[bdalton]

Jim Henry wrote "Right click on the file's properties and 'Unblock' the file so that the security block is bypassed:"

Thanks Jim,
I had tried that before and it did no good. The trick is you must "Unblock" BEFORE you try to open the file for the FIRST time after unzipping it.
Now it works.

Cheers
Barry

[moonskin]

I've made the changes you suggested Jim and added the section on splitting keyboards. Would it be possible to have Rick's MIDI document available on the virtualorgan.com Help page so that it is easier to link to it?

Is chm the wrong way to go for this? Would a pdf be better? Or I could leave it as a series of HTML pages. What do people think?