https://drobilla.net/2013-01-20T00:50:00-05:002013-01-20T00:50:00-05:002013-01-20T00:50:00-05:00drobillatag:drobilla.net,2013-01-20:/2013/01/20/ardour-midi-patch-controller-and-note-names.html<p>Ardour has supported displaying MIDI patch names loaded from a <a href="http://www.midi.org/dtds/midi_xml.php">MIDINameDocument</a> (or “midnam” file) for a while, though only patches, and even that was pretty flaky. Since this has become an itch for me and it's time for Ardour MIDI to reach release quality, I took some time to give it a serious overhaul. In this case, a picture or two is indeed worth a thousand words:</p> <p><a href="/images/ardour_midi_note_names.png"><img alt="Human readable MIDI note names in Ardour 3" src="/images/ardour_midi_note_names-150x119.png"></a></p> <p><a href="/images/ardour_midi_control_names.png"><img alt="Human readable MIDI controller menu in Ardour" src="/images/ardour_midi_control_names-150x104.png"></a></p> <p>The note names are mainly useful for doing percussion. Several of the bundled midnam files have note names defined, and I have added one for General MIDI drums, which more or less corresponds to a lot of instruments, including <a href="http://www.hydrogen-music.org/">Hydrogen</a>.</p> <p>Controller names, to my surprise, were not present in any of the existing midnam files at all. I wanted to sequence a hardware synth (the Moog Minitaur) without constantly referring to the manual and trying to remember which CC is which, so I wrote a new midnam file for the device and implemented support in Ardour. I am very disappointed to learn that there is no ability to group controllers, which really is the best way to do things, so I may embrace and extend (in a completely backwards compatible way) the format in the future to provide a better interface.</p> <p>The quality of midnam files scattered around the 'net is atrocious. The MMA actually hosts a DTD for it, but most files use the wrong DOCTYPE (usually with a broken link), among other problems. I fixed and cleaned up all the bundled ones in Ardour, validated them against the DTD, and left a README in that directory about how to do so. Hopefully this, along with incentive added by these features, encourages the community to grow a nice set of quality midnam files.</p> <p>So, MIDI name support in Ardour is now in pretty good shape. Now we just need to add the corresponding LV2 support...</p>