mciseq should be rewritten using winmm's midiStreamOut interface

Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com
Wed Nov 17 04:03:45 CST 2010


Hi,

midiOutShortMsg() is an incredibly bad API for SW synths.  It's just
good enough at the lowest level, to throw bytes to the serial
hardware.  It is antithetical to buffering.  The machine is stressed
to obey the event ASAP, which is travelling across several threads
that hence need be set as time-critical each, until a note is
eventually produced.  No wonder there's stuttering with some apps.

OTOH, analyzing several events in advance in a stream buffer, the SW
synth would have a lot of time to produce excellent quality output.

Consequently, Wine's MCISEQ should use WINMM's midiStream interface.
Then, the individual audio drivers should implement MIDICAPS_STREAM.
(Alas I don't know what MODM_ message corresponds to this.)
WineOSS.drv could then make use of SEQ_DELTA_TIME() and throw a whole
buffer of events at OSS' MIDI interface, instead of relying on
SEQ_DUMPBUF() to immediately start processing a tiny one note "buffer".

This implies that Wine must be able to mix several streams by event
timestamp, duplicating what MacOS' CoreMIDI can.  Perhaps this can be
delegated to the OS?  Unless it's easier to leave mixing in the file
parser, which is what MIDI_mciFindNextEvent() currently does,
generating one stream per file instead of one per track.

Converting a .mid to streams of MIDIEVENT might be useful as well
should Wine ever implement DirectMusic.  It may also help implement
MCI_SEQ_FORMAT_SONGPTR which is MCISEQ's default time format on native
for all .mid files I tried, not milliseconds or bytes.  Tests with
MCI_SEEK show that the native MCI cannot seek exactly to arbitrary
milliseconds, instead it steps in units of "song pointer".

Any volunteers?
What's the recommended place (what Wiki page?) to add this as Wine task
so every potential taker looking for a job can see it?

Regards,
 Jörg Höhle


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