Saturday, January 17, 1998
I chose the hard way and made my own setup. All I did was add meta events so that the Sys Ex parameter can be viewed at a glance. This should help me to eliminate mistakes.

Working with XG, I've noticed some big differences in terminology.

XG	GS
Element.............	= Voice (used as a Partial)
Voice...............	= Patch
Brightness..........	= Cutoff
Harmonic Content....	= Resonance
Note shift..........	= Key shift

There might be some more. The first two were confusing for the first couple of days. It would have been nice if both XG and GS used the same terms.

I worked through the afternoon to finish the song, making several changes to the effects. Why is the Effect Assignment Table always written in decimals! Can't they write them in hexadecimals? Me and my complaints, right? I continued to work and later that night had a meeting with a samba group that lasted for several hours.

Monday, January 19, 1998
I worked on the finishing touches for the song today. I needed a tool for checking the data so I started to run XG Checker Ver. 1.99. All I did was drop the SMF in, without even reading the instructions. It was amazing how many errors it found (if I had a penny for each one, I would be a rich man). The program seemed to be saying "Where did all of these errors come from?" Somehow, I found the courage to go on.

The only problem with XG Checker is that the default window size is too small. Errors and warnings are difficult to read. It was a pain expanding the window to read the check results every time. I corrected the errors and deleted tons of unnecessary afertouches on my sequencer. Afterwards, I set the record filter to prevent them from coming back permanently.

More errors. This time it's release velocity. I really hadn't paid much attention to it because it wasn't important in GS. I made the corrections on a sequencer and moved onto vendor information, especially the trombone in jazz. I took away some unwanted events again. If this didn't work, I would have had to get rid of the unwanted information manually... very time consuming.

I ran the checker again just to be sure. The file had become pretty clean but there was still a problem: multiple notes. I corrected these manually and made a list of all of the processes that I thought were important before having a file checked.

*** I noticed this afterwards but the tool has an auto correction feature as well as a setup parameter for it. It was too late. I wish that I had known about it because it would have been much more efficient. Really, there's no way of knowing how corrections of multiple notes will turn out since the correction algorithm is unknown (you'll know if you're willing to experiment, though). The tool is good for double checking certain problem areas and then going back to manually correct any errors.

*** Suggestion: use PDF files that can be read on Acrobat Reader rather than Post Card. The Post Card scroll is embarrassingly slow.

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