Hi David,

You're asking about two different things but I'll answer one at a time.
Quote:
In coding (or in practice for that matter) what is the difference between expression/articulation and volume, per se, and how is it programmed?

For example, when I am playing classical guitar, the sound (or one aspect of the volume) is caused by many factors, such the the pressure of fingers on BOTH hands, attack, plucking speed and many others. Not like a volume knob that just goes up and down.

They can't really but there are two ways that they can fake it.

One way is by velocity layers which has been mentioned by others. Simply, a sample can really be a number of layers where each is sampled by playing the note harder or louder. The term for this is depth with many of the expensive VIs having up to 30 layers or so. As we know, that's not the same as playing louder. When you play through your interface, the harder you play actually triggers a different sample than the one you triggered by playing softly. Though there are theoretically 127 layers, same as MIDI notes, the deep sample libraries might sample 20-30 layers on a piano.

The other way is Round Robin. With this, if you play a note, say, 4 times in a row, the library will alternate among 4 samples played at that depth (volume). Some do this sequentially while others do RR at random. The inexpensive libraries can't do this at all, of course.

In The Mercury (34.36 GB)/Mercury Lite (3.59 GB) example I gave earlier, some of the difference in size is explained by additional mic positions and effects but the full version uses 37,172 samples and has 4x Round Robin while Lite has 4,784 samples and has 2x Round Robin. Both have 8 Velocity Layers.


I want to grab some screen shots of Finale 27 before answering the other. I upgraded last week and want to make sure there are no changes in clearing MIDI Tempo data. I don't think there are but…

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