Bass clarinet playback delayed

• Apr 15, 2015 - 02:13
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
won't fix
Project
MuseScore

The playback of bass clarinet voices is slightly delayed compared to other voices.

See the attached file, with a flute, Bb clarinet and bass clarinet all playing at the same time. You can't hear any delay between the flute and Bb clarinet, but the bass clarinet lags noticably. When the note length is short enough (semi-quavers in the attached score), you don't hear the bass clarinet at all.

Maybe the sound font voice has some silence at the start, and the shorter notes play only the silence and then stop before the attack is heard? That's my best guess.

I'm seeing this in the latest nightly build (feafcc2), on Mac OS X. I have tried sound fonts FluidR3Mono_GM.sf3 and FluidR3_GM.sf3 and the effect is the same.

Attachment Size
Bass_clarinet_delay_test.mscz 11.58 KB

Comments

• Apr 23, 2015 - 03:35

Same thing here with 2.0 on win7.
It's also noticeable when clicking on the note to play the pitch: if you click on one of the notes of the last 4 bars and release the button quickly, you barely hear more than a pffft

Reply

• May 21, 2016 - 08:36

Hmm - seems I missed this one.

I'll look into it, but I think the problem will be with samples being played at a pitch they're not supposed to be - the lower you go, the slower the sample plays.

I assume we're talking about the default soundfont here?

The other issue could be speaker quality - laptop speakers in particular are incapable of reproducing low end frequencies properly, and even quite expensive desktop speakers also suffer from this unless they have been designed for studio use.

I will report back when I've checked the soundfont.

Reply

• May 21, 2016 - 09:23
Status (old) active ⇒ won't fix

My assumption was correct.

The Bass Clarinet uses the Clarinet Preset due to the absence of a proper Bass Clarinet in the GM sound set.

The notes for the bottom four octaves of the Clarinet all use the E4 sample, so consequently the lower you go, the slower the sample plays, the attack becoming increasingly sluggish as you go down.

There is no fix for this other than to use a different soundfont - I suggest using the one I have in development which you can find here......

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7cZM0RQwkwSZFVkeHJ5a1hObVE

This does have Bass Clarinet samples, and when finished will be replacing the existing instrument in the default soundfont.

Reply