I'm not sure if this topic is really supposed to be here at Polyphone support or at Soundfonts support, but I have to ask anyway...
I'm fairly new to the world of MIDI and music in general, but I can understand a bit of the technical side of the MIDI synthesizing. I'm having a problem when trying to pan stereo instruments outside the editor: inside the editor, when I test some stereo instrument it plays as it should, e.g. setting the C.C. 10 to full right, it plays the sample only in the right ear, and so on. But after I save my work, get back to some MIDI editor or player and test some mid file configured to pan a channel which have stereo instruments, the instrument keeps playing in both ears.
I already tried to meddle with the samples of the stereo instruments just to see exactly how the problem is, one of my tests was removing e.g. the left sample from an instrument, kept the right sample as it is (Polyphone Pan field set to +50, I think), saved the soundfont and tested it outside the editor. Then I made a test mid file in which I play a note in a channel panned between center, left and right, and I found out that the centered pan and the right pan played normally (as I removed the left sample from the soundfont, naturally it would play just the right sample in both occasions), but when the panning went gradually to the left, the right sample was gradually increasing its volume on the left and it wasn't decreasing its volume on the right! The result: when fully panned to the left, I was hearing the right sample in both my left and right ear, at full volume!
Now, I don't know where, whether it is in the Polyphone, or in the MIDI driver I use (CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth), or some setting within the soundfont file, but this isn't supposed to work like that at all, and I really don't want to "monofy" all the instruments of my soundfont file - imagine deleting stereo samples from countless instruments within a 1.3 GB+ file!
And by the way, mono instruments just works nice and smooth with panning.
Am I doing something wrong? Should I use another C.C. message to get stereo instruments to pan correctly, like that Balance message? Anyone here had some similar problem before?
I would say that Polyphone is doing its job correctly:
* in editing / saving / loading the pan values,
* and in panning the sounds when you play with the keyboard.
Now, if you don't have the same result when you edit the soundfont with another software or when playing the soundfont with another synthesizer, you should maybe send a bug report to their authors.
dont use stereo samples in a soundfont. instruments that play separate sounds for the left and the right ear dont exist. pick the sample from the best channel and make a nice mono instrument. if you want pan in your music, then add pan to your music in your DAW.
regards bottrop
