Re: [fluid-dev] Proposal for a new feature: lazy-loading of SoundFonts

[Marcus Weseloh]

Hi again,

just out of curiosity, I analysed a large library of MIDI files with regard to the number of program change events that they contain. I downloaded the geocities collection from https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-geocities-midi-collection-2009, containing around 51000 MIDI files that were found on Geocities from 1995 to 2009.

I counted the number of program changes on each channel and track, making sure only to count those changes that would actually lead to a new preset being loaded on a channel. The results are:

Total MIDI files: 51140
Broken files: 958
Analysed files: 50182

Files with...
1+ program change: 9284
10+ program changes: 1987
50+ program changes: 312
100+ program changes: 148
500+ program changes: 26
1000+ program changes: 7

The complete list and results can be found in this Gist: https://gist.github.com/mawe42/79613435312b08610abe36b247b39314

Not sure if we can extract anything useful from that information apart from the fact that there are MIDI files with lots of program changes out there. I was just curious to know for sure... and maybe someone else finds this interesting as well.

And no, this is not me trying to find reasons for the preloading feature :-)

Cheers,

    Marcus