Getting around problems concerning large numbers of presets

• YG 8 2

  Message de YG le …
  Hello puppies!  You may be familiar with my HyperSound soundfont, which is supposed to sound like an old-school sound chip or something. Just now, I've released an update to the soundfont which brings Roland GS support.
  
  In the future, I'm planning to add support for more MIDI standards (probably even Yamaha XG) and several sound modules (like SC-88 Pro and Yamaha MU128), possibly even Soundfont MIDI Player Android's exclusive instruments. However, there are 2 problems I'll most likely (if not certainly) face:
  

  • Lack of Bank Select MSB support for the soundfont technology. Soundfonts support only Bank Select LSB, and thus, only 129 different banks, each containing up to 128 presets. This allows for up to 16,512 different patches, of which 16,384 are melodic (banks 0-127) and 128 are drumsets (bank 128). However, not only does the lack of Bank Select MSB support make it harder to make a soundfont that complies to a certain MIDI standard perfectly, it also leads to the preset conflict problem. Speaking of which...

  • Preset conflicts. One MIDI standard may define one instrument on one preset and bank, while another MIDI standard may define a completely different sound on the same preset and bank. Here's a great example: Soundfont MIDI Player Android defines an instrument at 008:119 (bank 8 preset 119) called "Crash Cymbal," whereas the SC-88 defines "Reverse Snare" in the same place. I might have to move conflicting samples to different places, which can make support for a certain MIDI standard only partial.

  Can anybody give me some hints? Thanks in advance! <3
• BO 307 14

  Message de bottrop le …
  is 16K instruments not enough for you?
  bank 8 preset 119 is for a melodic preset, crash cymbal belongs to 1 key in a drum set.
  there is only 1 midi standard (like the word standard tells you)
  regards bottrop
• YG 8 2

  Message de YG le …
  bottrop, le … - Voir le message cité

  is 16K instruments not enough for you?
  bank 8 preset 119 is for a melodic preset, crash cymbal belongs to 1 key in a drum set.
  there is only 1 midi standard (like the word standard tells you)
  regards bottrop
  It looks like you didn't get what I mean. Soundfont MIDI Player Android has an melodic instrument at 008:119 named "Crash Cymbal," which is similar to how there's a melodic instrument for a tom drum at 000:118 (bank 0 preset 118) in General MIDI. I'm aware of the fact that both crash cymbals and tom drums are included in General MIDI's percussion kit.
  
  Plus, there's actually more than one MIDI standard. Those are General MIDI, Roland GS, Yamaha XG, etc. I'm just trying to achieve compatibility with all of those I know, full or partial. Probably you've understood the term "MIDI standard" as MIDI itself.
  
  Hopefully that'll let you understand better. Sorry for any possible inconveniences
• ZI 195 0

  Message de ziyametedemircan le …
  GM, GS and XG only agree on the basic bank 000:0~127 patches + the basic drumset in keys 035~081. The rest are optional. 
  The main thing is: if that bank is not available in that instrument (or soundfont), when you fallback to the main patch, you get an acceptable/substitutable timbre. Of course, most sf players do not comply with this and do not perform fallback, which results in no sound in that patch.
  
  Roland uses a logic (and sometimes goes in different directions) For example, bank xxx:119 is reserved for "Reverse" type instruments.
  
  Most likely the 008:119 you are looking at does not belong to other standards; maybe it belongs to a CM64(LA) map set to bank 008 (another old map), because there is a Crash-Cymbal in that position in that map.
  
  Note: In Roland manuals, this number is: 120, not 119, because this company: -the patch numbers listed in the manual or shown on the display- start from 1, not 0. But this is not the case when making a soundfont. It is necessary to make -1 from the number in Roland's official patch list. But the bank numbers in the same list start from 0. What a confusion!
  
  It is not possible to make a soundfont compatible with all of these standards. For example, Roland used banks 126 and 127 for CM64 in some of its models. But the 127th bank is a drumset for Yamaha. To solve the problem, even if LSB and MSB are used together, XG has already categorized them differently.

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