RE: FYI: GM Drums Patch Hash

> At 10:22 PM 2001-05-22 +0100, Lee Goddard wrote:
> >The spellings in both our versions are a bit anomalous, though:
> >"Mute Hi Conga","High Agogo", "Hi-Hat" ... is this intentional
> >on your part?   (I'm using a corrected version, as I can't
> >remember when to use which error.)
>
> No, not really intentional.  I got all that data from something at least
> semi-official-looking (whatever that means for MIDI specifications!).  I
> /think/ I considered "cleaning up" those spellings, but decided
> against it,
> since what do I know about preferred spellings for hi(gh)(-)hats?
> I do remember thinking that, notably for hi(gh) hats and quica/cuica,
> spelling variation was going to be a problem -- at least if you're going
> from strings to numbers.  Then there's the capitalization problem too.

Yeah.... well, fwiw, I'd use the OED, ignore obviously silly spellings
(which
includes 'hi' but also 'color'....), and for words of foreign origins, use
the
native (?) most common spellings listed from the OED.

> ... 2) someone can write a fuzzy matching routine that gets the
> percussion note number, given an effect name, but forgiving all
> sorts of variation.  Presumably the same algorithm
> could be used for getting the patch number, given the instrument.

I would do that, but, well, it just encourages bad spelling :)

> ... On the other hand, it's hard to
> imagine what fuzzy_patchnum('piano') should do, as there's a half-dozen
> kinds of piano patches, four of which ("Acoustic Grand", "Bright
> Acoustic",> "Electric Grand", "Honky-Tonk") don't even have the string
> 'piano' in their > "canonical" patch name.

Well, you could set links between all words in the patch-name file, plus
for the group names you list in the source, one of which would be
'pianos'...
but I really think one canonical spelling....

> Because of just these problems, I sort of hope that people can just manage
> to use the patch numbers either directly, or by deciding that the six
> instruments they're using in a given piece

Oh, I can't make a cacophonous mess with just six instruments!  At least
not as well as when using 40....

Thanks for your time.  And looking forward to Locale::Maketext - in
Unicode....

lee