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About Bands

Bands are used to change settings on PChannels. Although often used to make patch changes—that is, to assign different instruments to play notes—they can also be used to change settings that affect wave playback as well as notes, such as pan and volume.

Bands can exist in three different places in DirectMusic Producer:

You can create and edit a band in any of these locations. Changes apply only to the band being edited, not to any other one from which it was derived, even one with the same name.

Bands can be moved and copied between different nodes in the project tree, and any band in the project tree can be copied to a band track simply by dragging it. Bands can also be moved and copied from one segment to another in Segment Designer.

For information on creating and copying components in the project tree, see Managing Components.

A band can contain settings for as many as 999 PChannels. The set of PChannels in a band is the set on which changes are to be made, not necessarily the complete set of PChannels in use. For example, if PChannel 50 is already being used to play a trumpet sound, and a new band contains settings only for PChannels 1 to 16, any notes on PChannel 50 will continue being played by the trumpet, using whatever settings were last applied to it.

The instrument sound you assign to a PChannel can be from any of the following sources:

The GM.dls collection is available on every system that has the DirectMusic run-time files. Designing bands that use only this collection ensures that they will sound the same on all systems without the need to install other DLS collections.

Note   For more information about legal issues related to using the GM.dls., click the copyright link at the bottom of this page. In addition, for any component you use, read copyright information contained in the Info Tab of the Properties window for the component.


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