Working with MuseScore/Virtual Playing Orchestra/Ardour

[Rainmak3r]

Hi all,

I've recently started working with MuseScore and, while I love it, I've experienced some issues trying to make it part of the workflow I already had partly in place using Ardour and Virtual Playing Orchestra. In a nutshell, the main problem is that each staff in a MuseScore score becomes a single MIDI track in Ardour, which is problematic when you have different articulations in place and you'd like to use the different samples VPO provides instead, without copying/pasting to separate tracks. There's more to say on this, but you can find more info below.

Without going too much in detail here, I just opened a project on github that is aimed at trying to overcome those issues:

https://github.com/lminiero/musescore-vpo-midi-actions

The README contains a much longer description of the issues I was introducing above, and how I'm trying to approach it. Basically, the idea was to add new SFZ files compliant with VPO for the instruments I needed, specifically to use MIDI CC instead of MIDI notes as a keyswitch to change between articulations (VPO out of the box only provides the latter, via the -KS scripts). This then required some effort to also add the support for the related MIDI actions to a MuseScore score, to be able to drive those articulations while scoring there.

It's still very "green" and only partly working, but I thought I'd share it with you all anyway, to figure out not only if you have feedback to address some of the issues I've already identified (which are in the README as well, at the end), but also if there may actually be better and simpler solutions to my requirement out there I overlooked and that would not need what I've been working on at all.

Thanks!