Vibrating SP Midi - A little help offered a little more required!

[mrbadger]

Hi there,

I'm having a lot of trouble getting an SP MIDI ringtone to vibrate in time to my music and having scoured these boards I see I'm not the only one!

So, while I've not succeeded yet, I thought I'd post what I HAVE managed to work out...

There have been a few questions regarding:

1. Bank select message (Control Change #0) with value Bank# MSB 121 (79H)
2. Bank select message (Control Change #32) with value Bank# LSB 6 (06H)
3. Program Change message with value (Prog#) 125 (7CH)

Well, I've worked out that in cubase you can add these controls by double clicking on your midi track to open the key editor. The events lane at the bottom of the screen can be set using the pull down menu to its left to apply program changes. You just use the pencil to draw an event at the value of the instrument you actually want.

Regarding the Bank Selects, these are not available in the pul down menu to start with, you have to click setup at the bottom and then add them.

So, I think I've managed that bit. However, I've still not managed to get anything to vibrate!

I'm really not sure about what Note#=50 is all about regarding note on messages... What note is this?

Finally, when exporting a midi file from cubase I get a choice of type 1 or type 2... does this make a difference?

Does anyone have an example midi file which demonstrates how to get a vibration track to work? That would be SOOOO useful!

Last thing, my 2p worth... The audio suite tool is great cos it sounds so authentic... Its a shame it is a plugin for cubase rather than a stand alone app though... It would be great if it demonstrated vibration working, perhaps with a light that flashes in the window and the way in which you have to selct instruments really sucks! Perhaps this could be pulled into the plugin itself in future releases?

[enstedt]

Hi,

Could you send me the MIDI file in question and I will take a look at it, smart.messaging@nokia.com.

Best regards,
V / Forum Nokia

[mrbadger]

Hi there,

thanks for your offer of help.

I mailed the file to the address and got an automated response. So in case you didn't get the file it can be downloaded from http://212.53.68.227/vibratest/vibra.mid

Thi is the file that I think ought to use midi triggered vibration... but it doesn't!

In fact, I've noticed that there is some unwanted audio, which I guess is being triggered by the channel I intended to be vibration...

Any help in 'repairing' this file would be much appreciated. While I should be able to simply duplicate the channel from a fixed file I'm also very interested to know where exactly I've gone wrong!

Thanks again

Mr Badger

[enstedt]

Hi,

Noticed that your song is Type 0 MIDI file, ie. all events are using only one track. You could use Type 1 MIDI to organise the instruments better.

Best regards,
V / Forum Nokia

[jmajaniemi]

Hi mrbadger,

I had a quick look at your file and there seems to be three problems with your midi file.

1) Your program change message is not correct. You have used the value 125 when you should have used 124 instead. The SP-MIDI specification is ambiguous on this and on your post above you correctly list the values from the specification and the related Nokia documentation (125, 7C hex). But 7C hex is 124 decimal! I guess for some reason the decimal values for program change start counting from 1, not 0, and you actually should use the value 124 (7CH) in the file. So the hex value is the correct one. The "unwanted audio" that you heard is Helicopter, program 126 that corresponds to the value 125 in your program change message.

2) Your first bank select message (control change #0) has the bank value of 79 decimal, not the 121 (79 hex) that is expected. Looks like a typo to me.

3) But it still did not vibrate after those two changes. Having everything in one track seems to stop the vibration to work for this file for some reason. I moved the vibrator channel to a track by itself and that did the trick.


A nice little utility that I use for looking into midi files (and for precision editing) is Piet van Oostrum's (http://www.cs.ruu.nl/~piet/) mf2txt that is available from ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/MIDI/PROGRAMS/MSDOS/mf2t.zip
It is a DOS utility. I think he has the source code to the program available as well.
A command line like "mf2t -nv vibra.mid vibra.txt" will give you a file with a readable text dump of your midi file. You can edit the text file and then use the reverse command t2mf to get a midi file.

Note#=50 must refer to the numeric note values that are used in the midi file.

I hope this helps :-)

[mrbadger]

Hi there Jmajaniemi,

thanks for all your help! I've had a go at making the corrections, which all made a great deal of sense, and as far as I can tell I have done so correctly, but it's still not working... I uploaded my revised file in case you're interested!

Is there any chance you could mail me the file you fixed so that I can use that as a starting point? my email is mrbadger@mrbadger.com

thanks in advance.

Rich
Mr Badger

[jmajaniemi]

Hi Rich,

I have emailed you the files, also the latest one fixed.

You had the program change message before the bank select messages when it should be after. That's mentioned the MIDI_and_True_Tones_in_Nokia_Phones_v1_1.pdf as well (ch 3.2), but I forgot that I changed that as well when attempting to fix your first midi file.

The document also says that you should have a brief rest between the control messages and the first vibration note. You had the first nore before the control messages but that did not actually make a difference for the vibration. I still moved that note to be after the control messages in the file that I sent to you.

Enjoy :-)

[d_millimono]

Hi,

I came across this post while looking for a midi to text editor. There is a Linux version of Piet van Oostrum mf2txt at: http://midicomp.opensrc.org/

Cheers,

D. Millimono
Mlogik Ltd
www.mlogik.net