Musical instruments - request for input

[Carn]

Hi,

I'd normally ask this on the TG forums but erro banned me a year ago because he's a condom-head.

I've coded a thingy in C++ which works with byond to convert text into .midi files. The intention is to replace the lagtastic instruments in ss13 with it, so the timings aren't totally fucked up and seizure inducing.

I'm at the stage where the main code is pretty much finished. All that remains to be done, is to code the stuff that interprets the plaintext typed into the instrument popup within ss13. The one problem is, I don't know how that notation should look

I -could- use the current notation, however, because I'm using the midi file format, I can do so much more than current ss13 musical instruments are capable of.

Some examples:
Wider range of sound-samples: the minimoog could sound like a church organ, a harpsichord, a grand piano or make weird scifi noises. How would you tell the moog what you want it to sound like? typing #organ or #grandpiano etc? or something different.

Pitch bends: You can bend notes (sexophones :3). Any ideas how you'd do this in plaintext?

Guitars/Bass: Similar to the first point, how would you switch between effects like overdrive/distortion/clean? I'm currently thinking #overdrive or something. Should the notation be different for guitars? e.g. tune each string and then write the input like a guitar tab?

Drums: It can support drums, I have no idea how to implement the notation. Maybe a letter for each drum? H=hihat, B=bass-drum, T=tomtom, etc?

Hopefully somebody here is familiar with using the instruments in ss13, and can help me out with some advice. Otherwise I'll probably just end up making it horrible and impossible to use
Thanks

(wtf, my account is still admin =p)

I'll try to provide some examples of the old notation and what I'm working on once I figure out wtf I wrote on this notepad, because it makes absolutely no sense :/

[Leadpoisoning]

Hey Carn! Good to see you're still around.

I'm not very involved with the server anymore but this sounds like a really cool project. I'd suggest taking a look at ABC notation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_notation It's kind of similar to what you're trying to do currently--encoding music in plaintext--and also converts back and forth with .mid fairly well. Free-hand writing in ABC notation requires some actual skill, but there are a number of automated midi to ABC converters out there and lotro-abc.com has a large library of popular music in ABC format for free download.

ABC also has a fairly in-depth percussion/drums notation system, so even if you don't end up using ABC notation itself you might at least get some ideas from it.

ABC notation might be more complex than what you want to do but meh, it might be useful anyway. One thing to note: ABC notation does not support separated instruments/parts within a single file to my knowledge. If you try to play the same song with multiple instruments acting as a band, you need different files playing in sync, which is what Starbound has allowed. That said if you're building your own playback code and translating things into midis you might be able to use some custom metadata tags to tell instruments which notes to play or not play, but I wouldn't know about that.

[Carn]

Thankyouuu! x