It really might be "too many notes"...

[Ice Weasel]

So here is what might be clobbering some songs:

I've learned that the music rendering engine in LOTRO supports a fixed number of sample tones at one time, and any more "overload" the system. It's surprisingly easy to hit too many tones. 

A lute playing a triad chord, that's 3 tones right? Nope. Strings like lute, theorbo and harp have overlap in the tones, to give a "reverb" effect of sorts, like an expander on a synth. So, if two lutes are playing triads, then they take not six but TWELVE tones per beat. Then add each percussive sound, all the harmonies in the winds, any trills or appregios or accidentals... Even "simple" tunes can be using lots of tones at once, causing a system overload.

Bruzo, the guy behind the BRUTE converter, suggests stripping out string notes that don't contribute. That's over my musical head, ability wise, I think. But it might point to what we need to do... that's look for simpler, cleaner parts and not double tracks on one instrument so much. Might be better to drop them than use too many samples. 

[Briallan]

Interesting .. I was thinking it might have something to do with my using 1/64 notes (which I heard is the maximum the system can support) but maybe what you are suggesting is the real problem... will look at my stuff with that in mind.

Is there a discussion of this issue in the forums, and if so do you have a link to it?

[Ice Weasel]

(Trying to reply... the site is taking forever to load a page; not sure if this will actually post, but here goes:)

The comments were in a Starlight Orchestra forum, which is member-locked... but the guy to talk to is Bruzo. That's his GuildLaunch name, as well as his character on Landroval, so you might be able to contact him through PM. I haven't tried, but then, I'm a member on TSO, so it would work for me no doubt.  

I can't find a thread on the Turbine forums that relate to this, per se... there are a lot of threads in the Music System Topic that are lots of pages long, dealing with troubleshooting and the system in general.

His converter is a Work In Progress, but can be found here:  https://sites.google.com/site/brutemm/

I'll keep looking for some concrete information on this.

[Briallan]

Yeah, this is great .... any more tibits you can pick up, the better -- thanks for passing this on! Have you tried his converter? I might give it a shot after this concert when I have more time....

[Ice Weasel]

I downloaded that package, but haven't even opened the zip yet.... After this weekend, I'll look at it hard.

I do note that there is a GUI now. The one I looked at and didn't try before was pure command-line. 

Thing about TSO is that they are trying to push the envelope, so I'm hearing things about the envelope from people who've really investigated it. Really interesting.

[Ice Weasel]

You still need a fair amount of familiarity with the structure of the midi to use this.  The GUI is really a purposed text editor for the mapping files that BruTe uses to assign instruments.  The default settings gave me a polka I converted with nothing but lots of lute and lots of drums. LOL... Obviously, some more study is needed. I will say that the "good" lute track sounded a bit better to my decaying ear than one converted with Maestro. That could be hallucinatory, though.

Testing continues!

 

[Ice Weasel]

Research is on-going.

This is from a discussion with Bruzo:

There is another thing to consider, which is the total amount of tones being played at any moment. It is set in the UserPrefs, the default is 64 at max. So most of the audience will use that value. Background noises like /cheer or /clap reduce the available tones additionally.

What that means, is that *every* sound takes a "tone". A horse "clop", a "Clap", a "Roar", a firework"Pop", everything.  Further, very short notes take a lot of tone-space, as anything (and I'll verify) shorter than a 16th note is counted until the value reaches a 16th. Plus, on "overlap" instruments, it gets ugly fast. Imagine a Lute (sustained string, so "overlaps") playing 32nd note arpeggio of 8 notes. Sustained is double the count, two 32nd notes is a 16th, so... 8 notes times 2 (16 tones) times 2 (32 tones). Bang. One arpeggio, half the available tones for that beat. The engine deals with too many tones by dropping them, so, music may stutter, or tones simply not play.

Note too that this is controlled by the client, not the server, or the "musician". In a perfect world, you could get the audience to go into their Prefs files and bump up the Max Tone value... but in reality this is easy to mess up, completely trash the client, and most people wouldn't do it anyway. So, the best thing is to try to work within the tone limit of 64.