What is the max pitch bend range when exporting midi; cause for me the max is +128 and -128. So is it possible to increase max pitch bend range when exporting midi.
Exporting sample-based instruments defaults them to a +/-12 pitch bend range. For plugin-based instruments the limit is whatever you specify in the instrument editor for that instrument (up to +/-127); so if the default +/-12 is not sufficient for your sample-based instruments, you can work around this by converting them to plugin-based instruments (e.g. by assigning the default MIDI I/O plugin that ships with OpenMPT to those instruments), then you can adjust the pitch bend range freely.
So how can you expand an instruments pitch range to go beyond +128 or -128
Problem fixed :). Actually the problem was the rules for general Midi.
For anyone creating GBA music using sappy (USE MIDIFIX4AGB) it fixed all of the problems I had.
Sorry for wasting your time Mr Developer on something that had nothing to do with the music tracker itself.
No worries. But maybe you want to elaborate on the solution to your problem in case someone else runs into the same issue and ends up seeing this thread.
The song I was creating had a extreme portamento section and it worked fine in the tracker, but when I put it on GBA there seemed to be some invisable cap: basically the portamento would stop after the pitch values reached +128 or -128. After doing some more research I found out that the problem was not the tracker but the way the GBA was reading the midi file. midfix4agb fixes this problem.
You can, if you want to go the real manual way, open the midi-file in a midi-editor and put in the channels you want to have the bend-range go futher than 12-/+, and put a RPN parameter sequence, like this (in the event-view):
Event-Type | Data | Beat
CC | 101 RPN MSB 000 | 001:01:000
CC | 100 RPN LSB 000 | 001:01:001 <-- I've really never seen any issue with the LSB or MSB order, though " MSB Data Entry" must come last in order for the sequence to give any effect, thus why tick-offsetting is a good way to keep them in place when different midi-exporters might mess-up orders of events on the excact same timing
CC | 6 MSB Data Entry [xxx]| 001:01:002 <-- xxx = the range you want the pitch-bend to go (in semitone intervals)
Note though, in General Midi Level 1, as far as I know it's impossible to get a higher pitch-bend value than 128, simply because the CCs only use 7 bits, in other words, the only possible values is from 0 to 127. Some other extended midi standards like GS or XG might have an additional CC extending the range.
I noticed while reading the previous replies, right now after writing this above, that this lost a reason to be written, lol! but I post it anyway to be of help for anyone else running into a similar issue but wants to playback the midi file using MS-GS synth, etc. Note that doing this can end up messing with the pitch-bends in the midi-sequence, so be prepared for the risk of doing some additional tweaking.
It's also important to note that if you edit the file manually, the pitch bends as exported by OpenMPT will no longer sound as intended (i.e. they will slide a lot faster).