Herbert Chong

true but that leaves hundreds and hundreds still worth working on and the really interesting ones to me are the classical pieces. things like the entire Beethoven symphony collection is available as fairly high quality MIDI files. and yes i have been collecting music -1 files for a long time. a fair number of what i have are clearly better than what's on BitMidi and Midis101. i came across PSR Tutorials and if that's any indication lounge music however well performed is still lounge music but there are some gems in there. too bad they require a Yamaha XG device to work properly and i am trying to stop using mine because its really old. the goal to me was always to develop an interesting and eclectic collection of music where i can replace one or more tracks with something i can play with my WX5 and a good physical modelling synth. i have the VL70-m from when it was new but i am moving to virtual physical modelling instruments. after all is said and done messing around and having fun is more important than performing for anyone else but me. Herb...

i tried Google song identification and it mostly didn't recognize anything. i thought Shazam was paid. i didn't come across Soundhound. i will check them out more carefully.

given the file name that's a strong possibility. I've got probably a couple thousand or so of these unidentified to me songs collected away. a good chunk are just poor sequences that i'll keep in the deep archives for now but some like this one are worth looking through and tuning to sound their best. my collected MIDI files are highly biased towards popular and well known songs with a small mixture of original compositions. the most difficult to figure out are the classical pieces because there are hundreds of allegros in the classical music repertoire and i'm just not that familiar with some composers so unless it's something I've liked listening to it's just a blank. the next most difficult are the ones that seem to be General MIDI demo released by companies to show off their new tone generators. the early 90s were when a wave of GM devices were just coming out and wavetable synthesis was just becoming mainstream. i was one of the early adopters getting a Roland SC-55 when it shipped. i just put it back into storage last week after verifying that it still works. having said all that, i do know and have identified a few thousand already and moved the best performance sequences to a place to spend time working on. piles of the others are bad performances and i don't care what they are but i am reluctant to just discard them. disk space is cheap and MIDI files are small. modern MIDI file download places thankfully use long file names and give the entire song name. some people creating sequences even fill in the song title and composer along with their name on their MIDI files.

i've been poking through my collection of MIDI files i downloaded in the early 90s (over 6000) and trying to identify some of the more obscure to me songs. i know some are original compositions too but between being a long time ago, no documentation, not being familiar with many genres of music, and 8.3 file names, i really don't know what a good number of these files are supposed to be. for instance this attached General MIDI file seems like it's an arrangement of something successful but trying to play the file and using Google to listen and identify the song doesn't get me anywhere. i have created WAV files and uploaded to some free services and they either come up with nothing or clear nonsense. is there some online service that does decently in identifying songs differently arranged than any of their commercial releases? Herb... M_SALLY.MID

turns out there was a latency problem with one of my MIDI interfaces but eventually i did get it updated. Herb...

i have been hunting all over for something like this. the keywords needed in Google really brought up bizarre things. thanks so much. i also have the Advanced Orchestral ROM on its way to me to fully populate all of the ROM banks. it will be interesting playing with the classic Proteus sounds i liked and have access to them on my current setup. the 1+Orchestral and 2 were my go to synths once i started working on files intended for my own enjoyment. i won't delete anything from the definition but instead will create a new instrument with just my ROMs installed. this way if i get ambitious and purchase a second Proteus 2000 series synth i won't have lost anything. i was getting close though. only needed the MSB for the Advanced Orchestral ROM. i had all the preset definitions. that was pretty easy actually. and the next big quest? how to upgrade the firmware from 1.21 to 2.26. i need to put the 2000 into firmware update mode so i will be searching for that. Herb...

i'm using just the free Cakewalk so i don't know how much different it is from Sonar. what i do know is that i have installed TTS-1 following various instructions and some downloading and i also have Kontakt Player installed. a long time ago when Compuserve MIDI Forum was still a going concernt i mostly downloaded other people's files and looked for the good performances of pieces that i liked and then orchestrated them using my set of synths. looking over my file archive i mostly stopped downloading in 1994. the only hardware from back then i don't intend to sell is my WX11/VL70-m but I've also upgraded from the WX11 to a WX5. what i am settling down with for hardware is a pair of Roland SC-88VL, Yamaha VL70-m/MU-80 combo for some things, and a E-Mu Virtuoso 2000 with its two orchestral ROM and the Protozoa ROM. i probably will break out my Roland M120 mixer at some point but for now i am using a very inexpensive passive mixer because only part of my gear is out of storage. the next interesting problem i am running into right now is looking for an instrument file that defines the specific set of ROM i have inside the Virtuoso 2000. that's another topic will begin if i can't find an answer here. i got it used and it's just the tone generator, the power cable, and the manual. it seems from searching that it should have come with Cakewalk instrument files. i searched the Cakewalk installed emu.ins file and although it has a Virtuoso 2000, it is with the Composer ROM and doesn't include the three ROM that i actually have inside. i suppose i could map the patches i want into User1-4 but that sounds like a very big job. Herb...

that must have been it. i definitely didn't see it when i wrote this but eventually i did create some projects where its visible.

Ok, I tried to do step 1 but I don't see Clock as a Project preference. I wonder if the free version of Cakewalk has this? I didn't pay for my Cakewalk, just downloaded the free version and registered. For step 2 I might have known that the duration on a percussion track doesn't affect anything but it's long since vanished from my memory. Eyeballing the event list with a reminder of what to look for, I manually edited the few dozens events with really screwy durations. I've so far been doing minimal tinkering with these General MIDI files I've downloaded but I'm actually targeting either the TT1 that I found and configured for Cakewalk or my Roland SC-88VL that I recently got, or the Roland SC-55 that I bought many years ago. I understand that the TT1 is a superset of both my Roland hardware synths but there's a certain nostalgia playing with the boxes and getting them to work. I've got maybe a thousand MIDI files to sift through and spend time working on the ones where a) I can mute the lead track where I can play it using one of my wind controllers and my WX5/VL70-m combination, or b) play with it a lot to create something more like James Last/Dick Bakker sound. I want to add a MOTU Symphonic Instrument to my instruments to do b. Call me a modern day lounge lizard 8-). I think this MIDI file of Toto's "Africa" is something I can try a. Herb...

Thanks for all that replied. Now that I know what to look for, I can learn more about the current Cakewalk UI and try to edit the several bad events and fix the file. Whoever sequenced it did a good job and I'd like to keep using the file in my projects. My intent is to remember and practice using my Yamaha WX11 and WX5 to replace the melody track with the output from my VL70m. It's a stretch for someone who didn't take music classes anywhere. I've been downloading and carefully going through MIDI files to find high quality ones including music minus one files to learn from and practice with. Herb...

Hi everyone. I shudder to think how long it's been since I have done anything music-related but I'm pretty sure the last version of Cakewalk I used was Cakewalk Pro 5 or something like that in the mid-1990s. All I remember is that embedding WAV files into WRK files was a new thing when I packed up my MIDI gear into my storage locker. I was never experienced with music and MIDI but I had fun downloading and reworking MIDI files to match my synth stack and then recording the results. Anyway, on to my question: I'm rusty on terminology so I might be using the wrong words to describe things. I have downloaded a MIDI file that seems to go on and on after the last MIDI event shown in Events view on the percussion track. It's shown by Cakewalk as the last track with a note in the track view. In the Staff view I can see some note being played over and over past that measure but there's no actual sound. Various MIDI players for this file have many minutes of silence at the end of playing and I am trying to cut it off after the last audible note has decayed. What should I be looking for so that I can have a proper fadeout and then end for MIDI players so they don't go on for minutes of silence? Attached is the MIDI file. Africa.mid