Hi everybody,

I'm working on a little MIDI VST plugin that will generate a real-time guitar/bass fretboard display of the notes being played. What makes it different from pretty much every other fretboard visualizer that I've seen is that it shows the notes played in all possible positions simultaneously, serving as an educational tool to learn how to play the same thing in multiple positions. The user can customize the number of strings on the instrument and the tuning. Hopefully some people will find it useful. I'm planning to use it for a series of guitar lesson videos on YouTube.

Here's a simple example of my VST in its current early alpha form. This is a test with a simple example MIDI file I cooked up:


It's working pretty well so far, so I decided to export some MIDI from BIAB to test it out. Unfortunately, all of the notes coming from BIAB end up being visually "stuck," i.e. there appears to be no Note Off event telling the notes to stop playing. You can see that here:


I analyzed the output of BIAB using a third-party MIDI logger and my suspicions were confirmed. BIAB does not appear to generate Note Off events when a note ends. Take a look at this image (messages beginning with a 0x93 are note-on messages on channel 4... note-off messages would start with 0x83, but they never appear):


Further inspection led me to use BIAB's built-in MIDI Monitor (found in the Window menu). It produces the same result:


There is a filter option in the MIDI Monitor and I double-checked it to make sure that Note Off events would be displayed:


So, it's pretty clear that BIAB does not generate Note Off events. I have a few questions about this.

1) First of all, aren't Note Off messages an essential part of the MIDI spec? Why are they not being generated by BIAB?

2) How does the software know when to stop playing a note if there is no Note Off message corresponding to the Note On message? As far as I'm aware, there isn't any duration information in a Note On message, so I don't see how that would work.

3) Is there an option hidden in one of the menus in BIAB where I can enable Note Off messages?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Currently, BIAB's output doesn't work with my VST, which is a little frustrating.

Thanks!

Last edited by thesleeve; 08/30/15 10:31 AM.