Something Unreal

This update fixes a bunch of bugs and issues, and improves on what is saved between runs. As always, full details of changes are below, but please make sure that you check the details of which settings are now saved between runs to avoid any surprises, and because it has affected a couple of command line parameters.

You can download this new version here (7.82 MB).

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This is a tiny update which simply fixes the checkbox to enable/disable responding to MIDI channel coarse/fine tuning messages, on the “MIDI params” tab of the config window, so that it actually has an effect. Previously, Bawami always responded to those messages even if the checkbox was unticked.

You can grab this fixed version here (7.80 MB).

This is a big update which fixes a bunch of bugs, especially ones related to the PC speaker, and graphical mistakes. A new internal tuning system means Bawami now supports a big range of tuning messages (their effects can combine together!), plus there are a few new instruments and tweaks to existing ones.

Some of the MIDI Tuning Standard messages are quite advanced, and you’d typically use some other scale-related software to generate the SysEx messages rather than hand-crafting them, but they mean that Bawami can now play with tuning other than equal temperament, or different scales entirely (e.g. Arabic).

You can grab this new version from here (7.80 MB), and view details of all the changed stuff in the full post, below:

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This biggest update ever to my MIDI software synth contains dozens of bug- and crash-fixes, improvements to live MIDI input, and a big new feature for instruments called “multi-osc” (explained below), which many instruments now take advantage of! It’s stable when clicking “Apply” to restarting the sound system, which often caused crashes in the past, and there are a couple of new features to do with overriding controls. Also, one particular system file (included since a long time ago) is now correctly checked / set up when Bawami starts, which may fix Bawami not being able to start for some people. All these improvements mean that Bawami has grown to version 0.7!

The new “multi-osc” feature for instrument files allows one note to trigger more than one sound channel, massively improving the sound of some instruments. This opens the door to having a proper Fifths instrument, octave basses, octave-stacked strings, detuned Honkey Tonk, better organs and more! Of course, I updated lots of instruments to take advantage of this, and added new GS instruments whose sounds simply weren’t possible to generate before. Multi-osc is enabled by default, but can be disabled if you want to keep CPU usage as low as possible (if you really hate the new sound, you can replace all instrument files with those from the previous version, or have fun editing them yourself!).

You can grab this shiny new version from here (7.79 MB), and view the full post to see exactly what’s changed, below:

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I started playing around using the melody and chord progression that a huge number of people created together at CrowdSound, and ended up making this little arrangement for Bawami, my MIDI synth. It took a few hours over 3 nights.

CrowdSound is a site where people were given a chord progression and song structure, and were then allowed to vote note-by-note to make a melody. It’s an experiment to see if lots of people can work together to gradually make an entire song by voting on many tiny additions. Since people are making remixes already, I decided I’d try, too.

[Watch in HD]

As of the 15th of August 2016, only the melody is complete, so I imported the MIDI of the melody (from here) into Sekaiju (the MIDI editor I use). From there, based on the chord progression, I made tracks for bass, percussion, overdriven and acoustic guitar parts, 2-part pad and a portamento synth sequence to liven things up a bit. Then I decided on how I’d switch between the various backing parts so they weren’t all fighting for the spotlight at the same time. After that, I changed the velocities of all the melody notes (since I’m using a velocity-sensitive lead instrument on Bawami), to make it sound less annoying and repetitive and to complement the beat. I also shortened some long notes (which is within CrowdSound’s rules for arranging) to let the lead stop for breath every now and then, added modulation (vibrato) sparingly, and decided to somtimes pitch-bend from one note to another during the conclusion instead of instantly jumping (I think this should be allowed, because a real human voice would have to do this all the time =P).

In keeping with the openness of CrowdSound, you can download my MIDI (designed to be played on Bawami rev.132 or later) here. It uses several GS “variation” instruments, so it will sound worse on GM synths. It also uses an instrument (12-string Guitar) which is not present in Bawami rev.131, the currently-released version, but it should still sound fine on that version (it’ll fall back to the “Acoustic Guitar (Steel)” instrument). That, along with many other changes, will be in the next version I release!

This MIDI is playing on BaWaMI, which is a freeware, retro-sounding MIDI synth that uses subtractive synthesis. I’ve been working on it every now and then since 2010. You can find out more (and grab the latest version) here (click its title to get to the download page).

The 3D scrolling view of notes is MIDITrail.

Here’s my MIDI software synth Bawami doing its best to even keep responding while trying to play TheSuperMarioBros2‘s black MIDI “Arecibo“. The left view shows how it’s processing every MIDI message. Not shown: About 5 minutes of Bawami loading the 12MB MIDI file hideously inefficiently (tempo changes make it even worse).

[Watch in HD]

This problem of my player stopping responding when maxed out is something I need to (re-)fix. I fixed this a long time ago (probably before releasing Bawami), but broke it again afterwards somehow, also a long time ago now… As always, the most recent version of Bawami can be download here (also check the most recently tagged posts to see recent changes).

TheSuperMarioBros2 have made a lot of great black MIDIs that are often fun to stress-test MIDI players with. You can see lots playing at their channel (they also provide download links for the MIDI files). However, Bawami’s loading of MIDIs is inefficient, so I’d recommend not trying to torture it with black MIDIs too much. I also suggest unticking “Loop” so that, if it stops responding during playback, it’ll eventually start responding again at the end.

This is a small update which fixes OGG file rendering, and a couple of other superficial things.

• Fixed tabbing order of controls on “Mod shape” tab of the config window.
• Writing OGG files works again – I accidentally removed a file needed by the OGG encoder in revision 130. Users who extracted revision 130′s folder over revision 129′s would not have experienced the problem.
• Stopped warning about buggy controls from being displayed on the “MIDI params” tab of the config window, since it’s no longer true.

You can grab the new version from here (7.87 MB)!

This update lets Bawami write WAV files in paths containing non-ASCII characters (something long-overdue), and fixes a bunch of complicated interwoven bugs related to the handling of “bad” MIDI files and of percussive notes. There’s also a load of other fixes, including for portamento-related bugs, crashing in /translator mode, and visual fixes, and a couple of new instruments.

You can grab the latest version from here (7.81 MB), and see details of the changes below the page break:

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This is a nice big bunch of fixes – mostly related to /console-mode, but a couple of more serious things (which affect more people) are fixed, too.

You can grab this latest version from here (7.87 MB), and see details of all the changes below.

General bug fixes

• Fixed bug where button to browse for a new MIDI file remained disabled after opening a MIDI by dropping it onto the main window.
• Now recognises when a filename is passed on the command line without speech marks (and without any command line parameters). This fixes the problem of Bawami not opening a path+file containing no spaces if such a file was dragged onto its icon (or if Bawami is associated with .MID files), because Windows does not automatically surround such a path+file with speech marks when passing it to the program.

Fixes for when using /console

• No longer crashes if you’re redirecting Bawami’s output to a file or other program.
• When using “/infolevel 2“, log file text is now sent to StdOut instead of (accidentally) to StdErr.
• “Finished.” is now (always) displayed when shutting down.
• Key prompts for answers to questions are now sent to StdErr instead of StdOut (as was already being done for the question’s title and message), so that they’re visible on the console even if you’re redirecting Bawami’s StdOut to a file.

Visual-related fixes

• Green “settings” button’s tooltip is now loaded in the chosen language (instead of having no tooltip) (broken in revision 128).
• Corrected Z-order of several controls on the config window so that the dotted border that indicates a control that has focus isn’t having one of its horizontal edges cut off unnecessarily.
• Corrected a reference to how green “settings” button appears in info.txt.

Logging (also affects text shown when using /console /infolevel >=1)

• No longer shows “Closing MIDI input port” when shutting down, if MIDI-in wasn’t in use.
• No longer shows “Decoding absolute timings” a few lines after the last track has finished being decoded.

This version includes a whole load more bug fixes, plus some serious support for running Bawami from the console (command prompt), which also guarantees to never display message boxes, along with several other fun new command line parameters.  It should also start slightly faster (less writing to log file, and some language files are now only loaded when they’re needed), seeking to a different playback position is easier on the ears, and there’s a bunch of safeguards added to the code related to writing OGG files. A few command line parameters have been renamed to make them less long-winded, they all begin with a slash instead of a hyphen now, and Bawami now lets you know exactly which ones it didn’t understand (if any). But despite a lot of work being focussed on command line parameters, there are several GUI-related bug fixes, too!

NOTE: In order for Bawami to be able to output to the Windows console (command prompt) when using /console option, the EXE file is now compiled as a console-mode program. Annoyingly, this causes a console window to appear for a brief moment before Bawami’s main window appears. However, this doesn’t slow anything down; it’s only for part of the amount of time where, previously, nothing at all was displayed.

You can download the new version here (7.87 MB). Full details on all of the changes and bug fixes are below, but allow me to first introduce a new feature of Bawami:

The /console command line parameter

If you run Bawami from the command line, this option should be very useful, and is highly recommended instead of /invisible. Text is output to “standard output” (meaning you can see what Bawami’s doing in the console), and you can respond to any messages by pressing keys on the console, too. In this mode, Bawami also starts faster and is safe to crash in the middle of playback (nothing is leaked – but for now, make sure that you also kill the OGG encoder if you crash it in the middle of writing an OGG file). Just for fun, you can also view every single raw MIDI message scrolling up in the console as it plays (/stdmidi) , and use /infolevel 1 or 2 to get a more in-depth look at exactly what’s going on internally. Of course, these options which spam text to the console will slow Bawami down a bit. Please check the “COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS” section in info.txt for full details, and see below for an overview of all changes/additions.

View all changes below the page break:
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