How to deal with old Scratch 1.4 sounds? about scratch-audio

[ed-cooper]

Is it not possible for Scratch 3 to use the default MIDI synthesizers on the computer then?

(Btw happy 2017! 🎉)

[ericrosenbaum]

Thanks for your comments on this! The way we will handle the instruments in Scratch 3.0 is at an early stage, but we are likely to maintain compatibility with the smaller Scratch 2.0 set of 21 instruments.

The original larger set of 128 instruments imitated the existing 'general MIDI' standard. The updated set of only 21 instruments reflects the design philosophy of Scratch: a balance between simplicity (a small number of options that is friendly and not overwhelming) and flexibility (a diverse set of options that you can use lots of different ways).

The actual implementation of the instruments will be done in the browser using its webaudio functionality, so that the experience will be consistent across platforms.

Right now what we have is a sort of temporary placeholder functionality, which plays notes using an existing soundfont library. These soundfonts are high quality, but far too large in file size for our purposes, and for the moment they load on demand (i.e. at the moment the 'play note' block or 'set instrument' block runs, if the soundfont has not yet loaded, it loads, causing a delay of a few seconds). Other (temporary) limitations include the fact that we cannot route these sounds through all of the audio effects, we cannot set the volume, and we cannot sustain the sound longer than the sample duration. All this will change once we decide on a new approach that gives us high quality sounds with a reasonable file size.

[towerofnix]

I suppose, on the VM/blocks side of the project, extending the normal "set instrument" block to support the 128 MIDI instruments (coming to a total of 149 instruments) could work.