The Sound Board

I created a bunch of Reaticulate banks for various instruments for use in Reaper. What I didn't do was to sync all program numbers across the instruments. So in one instrument "legato" can have program number 10 and in another it can have 4 all depending on how many articulations and in what order the developer ad them listed. I simply went from "top to bottom".

Reluctant to do it all over again I asked Gemini if it could help to sync the articulations. No problem, I explained the problem and got a thorough response how we should go about it. Gemini even had a long answer how to actually create a file from scratch with example code and all.

Uploaded the file and after a few questions back and forth on how to structure it all they are now synced!

Very nice when copying from one instrument track to another.

If anyone is interested in a copy of my geminified reaticulate.reabank (VSL Woodwinds, Synchron Strings Pro, Synchron Elite Strings, Modern Scoring Brass, Modern Scoring Strings, VSL Special Editions 1&2) can get a copy here:

Being able to copy MIDI items between tracks using different instruments is one of the reasons that the program numbers for common articulations is documented. Doing this even allows you to copy MIDI items between different VI libraries/vendors altogether. Taking that a step further by aligning program numbers for other articulations (outside the standard documented set) that are available across multiple instruments in a given product also makes a ton of sense for the same reason.

Unfortunately this is one of the aspects of the documentation that most people ignore -- I think mainly because it takes a fair bit of attention and the value isn't immediately clear (it's one of those quality of life things that you tend to only realize later) -- so most of the articulation maps floating around using effectively random program numbering. And once you have it a certain way, it's difficult to change because it will break existing projects (unless you create an entirely new version with a different id), so there is a degree of inertia involved that perpetuates the misaligned numbering.

It's interesting to have Gemini (or any LLM) take care of this for you. I wonder if you first pointed it at the custom reabank docs and then told it to have at it, whether it would have used the recommended numbering. I use LLMs a fair bit nowadays (mostly Claude, but sometimes Gemini and ChatGPT) and when it comes to precise technical work (programming, especially) the hallucinations can be subtle and insidious, but there's no denying its utility for a large number of tasks.

Did you find Gemini did a good job here straight away, or did it take a lot of coaxing?

No I didn't point it to the docs, just asked if it knew Reaticulate and the answer I got sure sounded like it did

It took a bit of back and forth setting up the rules and priorities for what I wanted. And yes it started very good but when working on Modern Scoring Strings, which has about 120 "articulations" when using the CC-stacked variant, Gemini started using numbers over 127, because of the rules that were setup

When notified it redid them. I haven't gone through every instrument and checked if it is correctly done but looking at the code it seems pretty consistent.