Hi John and welcome to the group. I think SFs have a lot of
potential for offering extension ranks for your residence organ. If
you have not already done so, I would suggest obtaining copies of
Bruce Miles' English Organ SF at
http://www.gbmuk.fsnet.co.uk/
and John McCoy's Jeux SF at
http://members.aol.com/realmac/jeux1.htm
and see how well they fit in with your real ranks. I would guess
that you'll need to do some experimenting with speakers and such to
achieve a sound that blends well. I know that it is not uncommon to
augment pipe organs with electronic ranks and even to add extensions
to ranks electronically. So it can be done. There is nothing that
I've seen that would discourage me from the idea of using SFs with a
SoundBlaster Live! card as my electronic synthesizer for that
purpose. You may get into some issues of having enough MIDI channels
if you are really ambitious about the size of organ you want to
create. If you limit yourself to 16 added ranks, things should be
pretty easy. Even 32 ranks shouldn't be too hard. Beyond that
requires a little more effort to get all the hardware to live in
cooperative harmony.

I gather that the YAPPI boards receive the MIDI Note messages from
the keyboard for the division to which the rank belongs and pairs of
MIDI Program Changes for stop on/off for the stops in the division.
The YAPPI board itself then puts that information together to decide
if a pipe should be on or off. The soundcard providing the SF ranks
is going to need something different. Since you are working on your
software for the YAPPI requirements, you might want to think about
the sound card at the same time. The sound card is precisely the
MIDI device that doesn't really fit the way a pipe organ is
constructed. To be able to add and subtract stops at will you need
to put each stop on a seperate MIDI channel and use software to
translate the key and stop MIDI messages into appropriate MIDI note
messages on appropriate channels to send to the sound card. Let me
know if would like to discuss this in more detail. I am guessing
that much if not all of this is something you have already considered.

Jim Henry

--- In theatre-sf@yahoogroups.com, "fredhaskey" <johnh@p...> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I am also interested in the possibility of extending
> the available 'ranks' on the organ using a PC with sound
> fonts. I look forward to learning more from the group.
>
> ---john.
>
> ---
> John Haskey
> yahoo (at) haskey.com <-- note email address