Re: converting files

[Stefan Westerfeld <stefan space twc de>]

   Hi!

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 03:45:03PM +0000, Robert Grow wrote:
> I was wondering if there is any way to convert a bse file to midi format using
> beast? I've written a couple of songs that I want to run through rosegarden and
> zynadd together but there doesn't seem to be any way to convert the bse file
> from beast to midi that will aactually work on rosegarden and I havne't been
> able to link anything to beast through Jack,...why is Beast so incompatible
> with everything else? I am getting to the point of manually entering each note
> from my songs I created on beast into rosegarden to get them transferred. Any
> help? Thanks in advance.

Midi export would definitely be a feature worth including, and I've even put it
on the list of things that I'd like to implement some day, but I really can't
tell you if/when I'll find the time to produce a mergeable patch. However, if
you can and want to implement it yourself, go ahead, and if you need help, just
ask.

A very unintrusive solution would be to read the .bse file directly (its a text
file + binary appendix), and convert the events in something suitable for
import into Rosegarden. But of course for inclusion into BEAST, its better to
implement midi export in C(++) and put the code into the bse library and make
a menu entry for it in the GUI.

Jack support for BEAST is also on my TODO list, and I have a working prototype
driver (audio only, no midi), but when this is available in upstream isn't
certain.

Finally, to the question why BEAST is so "incompatible" - one of the main
design ideas for BEAST was to make the program self-contained. You should be
able to do music with BEAST, and whereever you install BEAST, in this version
or any later version, the song should sound absolutely the same. External
components, like external synthesizers or audio effects or even an external
sequencer make it hard to reproduce the same sound elsewhere, and they make it
harder to get things running in the first place.

That said, I've always believed more interoperability would be desirable, and
being able to use Jack together with BEAST would be a good first step.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan