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SMF import without affecting rhythms at all

Posted

Before I dig into Synfire, I want to make sure about this so that I don't waste time. The rhythms in the MIDI files I produce are polyrhythmic or irrational rhythms--whatever nomenclature you prefer to characterize things like quintuplets, septuplets, 7-in-the-space-of-3, etc. I want Synfire to preserve these rhythms exactly. I understand that Synfire applies useful compositional intelligence for pitches and pitch sequences, which you can override with the static pitches import. That's all fine. I want to make sure about rhythms because I don't see a "static rhythms" feature. It looks like Synfire's figures are for getting creative with pitches and that rhythm remains identical to the original. Is that correct?


Tue, 2023-01-03 - 18:41 Permalink

Rhythm is not altered during import (unless you deliberately quantize it). Internal resolution currently is 1920 ticks (480 per quarter note), so 1/7, 1/9, 1/11 etc. get rounded to the closest tick.

When you later edit those figure segments however, moving symbols around will snap them to the grid you have selected.

Thu, 2023-01-05 - 15:04 Permalink

> quintuplets, septuplets, 7-in-the-space-of-3, etc

Just for completeness: In case you later want to export music notation, that is limited to quantised triplets and quintuplets at most. For MIDI export, you can have much more complex rhythms.

 

Sat, 2023-04-29 - 12:00 Permalink

Thanks for the info. In this case, I just need the MIDI files to use in hardware that plays back MIDI files, for example, AKAI MPC.