SD3 drastically misrepresents attributes of 3rd-party MIDI files

[soundsgood]

I’m in v3.1.2, and while I have tons of Toontrack MIDI, today I decided to use some BFD MIDI files that I had on-hand. Until today, I had not added any 3rd-party MIDI to SD3, so I added the “BFD Latin” folder to the database. But in the Grooves browser, SD3 reports all of the BFD MIDI files as being 82 bars long! At first I thought the MIDI files were defective, but when I drag them into my DAW, each file is only 2 bars long. So, why does SD3 think they’re 82 bars long?

You may be thinking: If they drag properly, why does it matter? Well…

– Because when I play the grooves, they don’t loop, because after the 2 bars of notes, SD3 continues to play the 80 bars of silence before looping back to bar 1.

– The 80 empty bars also cause SD3 to miscalculate the “intensity” property (because SD3 thinks each MIDI file is 98% “empty”).

Toontrack, with SD3 now being a year old, I’m surprised this hasn’t been spotted/addressed by now. I trust this is something you’ll want to fix. Until then, any workarounds?

Topic

[Henrik Ekblom]

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been reported before, so that’s why we haven’t fixed it.

Does this problem occur on all BFD MIDI files, or only the BFD Latin files?

Can you upload one of the MIDI files where this happens so the coders can have a look at it?

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

• This post was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Henrik Ekblom.

[soundsgood]

Henrik Ekblom wrote:

Does this problem occur on all BFD MIDI files, or only the BFD Latin files?

So far, I’ve observed this in the BFD Latin files and the BFD Jazz files (but not the BFD R&B files.)

 

Henrik Ekblom wrote:

Can you upload one of the MIDI files where this happens so the coders can have a look at it?

Yes, of course. I’m attaching a zip file containing one Latin MIDI file and one Jazz MIDI file.

Thanks.

[Henrik Ekblom]

Thanks for the file. I’ll hand it over to the highly trained computer dudes in the coding closet, and they’ll look at this

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[soundsgood]

Henrik Ekblom wrote:

Thanks for the file. I’ll hand it over to the highly trained computer dudes in the coding closet, and they’ll look at this ?

Thank you.

 

[Henrik Ekblom]

We have analysed the file and noticed that BFD has set the length of them to 82 bars. This may have been unintended from their side since some DAW:s don’t care about the length of the MIDI file, they only show the part where there is MIDI data. However, Pro Tools, Toontrack and some others, use the length of the MIDI files since we want users to be able to have a file with say 1 bar with drums and 3 bars of silence – if that’s what the user wants to have.

However – to say that they don’t follow the MIDI standard doesn’t help you, since you are affected by this problem. I will write this up in our feature request list and we’ll look at it. I can’t tell you when, or if, we’ll do something about this issue.

In the mean time, the best workaround I can think of is for you to take the files you want to work with, drag them to the song track and make them the correct length. Then drag them to your User MIDI folder and they’ll be correct shown in Grooves.

 

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[soundsgood]

Thanks for investigating.

[Author]

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