playing a single instrument??

[bradholland]

Hi there, thanks for this wonderful implementation. It's really making my life a lot easier.
I would like to know if it is possible to play a single instrument, instead of a preset?

In my application, In the tree view of presets, i can click a preset and it loads into spessasynth so i can play it, i can also expand the tree node to show its children (instruments) when I click an instrument it drops me further down the tree to that instrument, now I want spessasynth to load or play only that instrument.

is this functionality (similar to polyphone) possible with spessasynth?

thanks again

[spessasus]

Hi Brad,
The answer unfortunately is a no.

Long explanation:
"Preset" refers to the actual MIDI patch that a synthesizer can play. "Instrument" is just an abstraction layer between the presets, only useful and seen when editing the soundfont with an editor like Polyphone. Spessasynth is not a soundfont editor, it's a synthesizer. And a MIDI synthesizer needs the MIDI bank and program numbers to select, which instruments don't have. Only presets do.

But if you really need to play only one instrument, you can simply create a preset that contains the exact instrument with no modifications. There's a button for that in Polyphone:

You can then select that preset in spessasynth, and it will sound exactly like the instrument.

The same case with samples, you can't just the sample itself. You have to bind it to an instrument and then to a preset, which will be available through the preset list.

I hope this helps.

[bradholland]

it certainly answers my question, thank you.
I'm actually attemping to build a soundfont editor, like polyphone but in the browser and am so far building it with spessaynth and soundfont2
I've already got it to a stage where I can playback a single sample now.... :)