Synthesia Talk

My ipad version seems to lack the option to modify the instruments for the tracks:


Nothing happens when I tap on the instrument name and there are no icons.

I'm running v10.5.4798 on iOS 9.3.5

Any tip on how to get this back? I'm pretty sure it was available before.

Do you have Settings --> Advanced --> Instrument Change Messages set to "Filtered-out"?

It was a quick, last-minute change (and could definitely be improved by putting something else there instead like an X that produces a help message when you click it), but I wanted to indicate that changing instruments would have no effect because instrument change messages won't be sent anyway.

Yes, that was it and agreed, it could do with some explanation (perhaps a horizontal box in the bottom or when pressed).

I had changed that at some time because I wanted to play with the Clavinova's instrument settings. Didn't work out as intended, because I'm still pretty sure that the piano sounds different when played with Synthesia providing e.g. the left or right hand and me playing along, compared to playing from sheet music alone. It's like as if the touch sensitivity is gone or at least much harder.

On a different note ... I'd like to be able to customize the selection of voices. My Clavinova 535 has 35 builtin voices and there is only a partial overlap with the instrument choices given.

Hmm, I'm having trouble imagining how to do this in a generic way for any keyboard in your situation (outside of trying to compile and maintain a database of keyboard models and their instrument mappings, which sounds like a lot of work). The reason I've stuck to the GM (or General MIDI) instrument list is because it's a standard that is followed across many (most?) digital pianos. Once you get down to the level of the per-model decisions that each company is making about how to order their instruments, the waters get quite a bit muddier.

I guess it's way too much of a fringe requirement to implement via the GUI. But if there were a mapping file I could customize and an example with a little guide I would be happy to edit it in notepad for use in Windows and perhaps Android (assuming that getting such a file into iOS without a GUI dialog would be a challenge).

Is it a matter of the voices being inaccessible? Or is the trouble that you have to pick something unrelated (say, a flute to get strings)?

Even the method you described would still take a fair bit of UI work to generate the instrument pop-up in a custom way. (The text file would also need to specify groupings, category names, icons for each instrument, etc.) At some point it might just be easier to keep a little piece of paper next to you with the mappings written down.

Perhaps I actually have a different issue. My Clavinova CLP-535 has a very limited list of 35 preset voices (see here). But it does have Yamaha XG voices (of lower quality), basically an extended general midi set built-in for midi playback, but not accessible for playback with the regular keyboard.

Ideally I would want the instrument selection to utilize the xg voices (or at least the GM subset) for notes played by synthesia and the preset voices for my playing.

I have to double check, but I might have seen an effect when connected to Windows via USB to host that the clp display showed something like "xg voices" during playback, while this hasn't appeared connecting via midi to the iPad.

Hmm, when I checked that manual (admittedly a few weeks ago now; sorry for the wait! ) it looked like only the higher-end models (585, etc.) had the XG voice set built in. Have you ever been able to get your 535 to produce those other sounds?

The display shows XG when connected, but I think only the percussion sounds are available.