I may be doing something very stupid, in which case I apologise in advance. Here’s the situation.
I have a newly completed Zynthian box, hooked up via midi to my windows 10 PC running the latest version of Sonar Home Studio. Audio output is plugged into my mixer - audio output itself seems ok.
As a test, I’ve loaded up a midi file to play. It has five tracks on separate channels, and I have set up the Zynthian with five layers, one for each channel, and allocated the patches as required.
Channel 1 is supposed to be a saw wave lead (from the GM set). And yet, when I start the midi file playback, I can see the patch change on channel one, from saw wave, to acoustic piano. I’ve inspected the track in a midi editor, and before the notes begin there is a patch change message to saw wave, a volume command, and that’s it. So I cannot see why the patch changes to saw wave. If I change the patch back to saw wave on the Zynthian, it continues with the correct sound for the remainder of the track.
I’ve had a look at the other tracks, and they are set up the same (different patches) but in each case, as soon as the midi file playback is started, all the channels change to acoustic piano.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but just to confirm, if I hook up my M-audio oxygen 8 to one of the Zynthian usb ports, I can set up sounds with fluidsynth, or LinuxSampler, and play (very badly) sounds that I choose, without them changing.
I tried a different midi file player, and got the same problem, so it seems to be a midi file problem, but I can’t see the events that are causing it.
And another comment from me. If I set up that channel to use fatsynthbass from Linuxsampler, and start the midifile playback - it changes the patch to jazzbass. Weird.
I can confirm that this seems to happen with any midi file. And if I take out the patch change events from the file, then it plays OK. So patch changes are being interpreted by the Zynthian incorrectly, as far as I can see, in both Fluidsynth and LinuxSampler at least - I haven’t tried any other engines yet.
Midi commands are not intercepted by the Zynthian interface. They are send to the plugin and that plugin is making the program change according to its presets. best advice remove the Program change information from your midi files.
I will try to fix the problem when implementing the new MIDI Master Channel functionality. Until then, better to remove program change messages from mid files
Other than that, the Zynthian is great, just so long as I don’t overload it with too many layers with too many events, otherwise the sound breaks up, which is understandable.
Sound quality is very good indeed. I’m very happy.
Although I’m going to have to get a mixer with more inputs
