SOUL PadSynth always plays note 0x6C

SOUL
#1

Trying my hand at loading my own SOUL patch and playing it, using the SOULPatchHostDemo and PadSynth.soulpatch as example.

Loading and creating of a player works, but when I send a MIDI note on to it I always hear a high-pitched sound. Playing around in the demo tells me I’m hearing pitch 0x6C, even though I’m clearly sending 0x3C to it (in fact, it doesn’t really matter which pitch I use, always sounds the same). Here’s the corresponding code:

std::array<soul::patch::MIDIMessage, 1> midiMessages = {
  soul::patch::MIDIMessage{ 0, 0x90, 0x3C, 0x64 }
};
     
context.incomingMIDI = midiMessages.data();
if (!triggered)
{
  context.numMIDIMessages = midiMessages.size();
  triggered = true;
} else {
  context.numMIDIMessages = 0;
}

Thing I’ve checked:

  • I’m creating the player with the correct sample rate (44100) and buffer size (512) using compileNewPlayer() (the other arguments are nullptr, is that ok?).
  • Input channel count is 0, output channel count is 0 for the RenderContext.
  • No compile messages (error or warning) were given.

Normally I’d dive into the code myself and figure out what goes wrong, but clearly I can’t do that with the dylib right now. Does the JUCE/SOUL team have any idea what I could be missing? The demo app works fine, using the same dylib, so the problem must be somewhere in my code, but I’ve yet to find a clue.

#2

The padsynth is a bit of a complicated beast, and expects to get MPE with continuous pitch bend data (so I don’t think a note on channel 1 would technically be valid MPE). Maybe try a simpler sine synth to start with? Or feed it real MIDI from a real device to make sure you’re not just giving it duff input.

#3

Aaaah, yes, that was it! Thanks for clearing that up, Jules :slight_smile:

(Didn’t know SOUL supported MPE parsing out-of-the-box!)

Edit:
Given that pretty much all the .soul’s in the example are MPE parsed, might be interested to include some more actual simple ones to avoid confusion? For testing purposes?

#4

In fact: this leads me to another question: is there a parser that just converts midi::Message to NoteEvents::noteOn/noteOff/etc.? Like midi::MPEParser, but for parsing regular ol’ MIDI?

I’ve got more questions than these, I’ll take them over to the Slack channel for details :slight_smile: