[SDL] More MIDI woes

[David Olofson]

On Sunday 10 February 2008, Mason Wheeler wrote:
> >Your 
> mail 
> client 
> is 
> adding 
> bogus 
> newlines 
[...]
> Very strange.  When [SDL] forwarded my own message back to me, it
> didn't look like that.  Anyone else get it all munged like that?

It looks ok when I view the HTML part in HTML mode. Looking at the 
source, it turns out that both text and HTML parts are formatted like 
this - it's just that HTML normally translates any amount and kind of 
whitespace into a single space.


[...]
> The 
> Source. 
> ;-)
> Lo siento, señor.  No hablo C muy bien. :P  (I'm a Delphi programmer
> who's incredibly grateful to the SDL and JEDI-SDL people for doing
> what I couldn't have done.)

Oh, well. At least it's theoretically possible. ;-)


[...]
> Perhaps.  But I'm writing my program to be compatible with another
> program of a similar nature, and *it* has games written with it that
> use the timing issue as it is, in scenes where events are
> synchronized with the music.  Maintaining compatibility is a higher
> priority than dealing with issues that may or may not technically be
> bugs.

Well, yeah; if that's the "specification", one would assume the 
content authors are aware of it and expect that behavior.


> (Besides, lead-in silence makes looping music rather 
> awkward.)

Actually, it's pretty much futile to try to implement looping outside 
the player anyway. It just can't work reliably, unless you can do it 
from within a callback that runs in the context of the MIDI player. 
(That is, real time for h/w MIDI, or in between the "MIDI tick" 
fragments for custom software synthesis such as Timidity.)

Just so you don't lose too much hair trying. :-)


> I'd rather see an option to skip it. 

Is this Timidity (software integrated in SDL_mixer) or one of the 
native MIDI drivers you're using? (Didn't find any "skip initial 
silence" logic in either version, but anyway...)


> Thanks for your help!

No problem. :-)


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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