for those who use Timidity++

Hi all,

In the past, I've been frustrated with the audio quality of Timidity,
mainly, distorted clicks on what I thought were attacks. It turns out
they were release envelopes being non-existent in a given Soundfont,
and Timidity not having a built in 'bad release de-clicking' provision
coded in. I have been discussing this issue with an ex-Timidity
developer on the Timidity-talk list, maybe it will make it's way into
code...

For now, I found an excellent sounding workaround...in the
'timidity.cfg' file, you can add a 'rate=attack:decay:sus:rel' option,
where each env segment is an integer from 0-255, 255 being fastest,
and 0 being slowest, in a non-linear scale. To just change the release
time to prevent clicks, just do as in this example:

#ins-number file bank prog [options]
23 MySoundfont.sf2 0 23 rate=:::160

I found by experiment that the release value of 160 removes all
audible clicking artifacts satisfactorily to my ear. You can use an
editor capable of automacros and append the rate option by default
after each patch entry to save typing.

I have been enjoying tuning a ton of medieval MIDIs to Pythagorean
(and sometimes SuperPythagorean, but I still prefer the pure
5ths!--someday I may want to code an adaptive algorithm to get wide
thirds close to 14/11 or 9/7 a la Margo Schulter's taste, but not a
priority now) using Timidity, with some high-quality early music
soundfonts, and also the really amazing 'Jeux' organ soundfont with
excellent results, some of which I may share here at a later time...

Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org