So this community has always been so kind and helpful, here's a little giving back: while on my endless quest towards recreating human pocket and groove 100% ITB, I stumbled upon this little piece of code. It deals with many different kinds of swings and grooves, like many drum-machine and DAW built-in tools. However:

- it adds zero white noise humanization
- it spits out MIDI files with as many bars as you wish
- it can generate evolving grooves

This last one is important. So everyone knows that a musician might play with an overall 40% swing feel, but that exact 40% won't be met every single note and pause, simply because the musician is not a perfect machine. Now, how will the musician stray away from the 40%? Well, most likely rushing or dragging a little, and this is exactly what Marathon allows you to program: a groove going from 30% swing to 40% swing across 16 measures, for example.

Now, of course musicians will also make mistakes on the down beats, but these seem to be much more rare than swing deviations. Also, downbeat deviations (it seems to me) are more related to global tempo deviations, which the band/orchestra fall into as a whole, rushing and dragging together towards the chorus, for instance. Perhaps most importantly: those who use white noise humanizer algos know how they can take something robotic and turn it into something sloppy, with no 'accomplished human' shade in between. This changes everything.

To me, the above is tremendous news. I hope someone else can find this useful, even for electronic genres (in fact, I think this could be a breath of fresh air mostly to the stiffest ones). If not for that, this is the first reliable samba generator I've ever heard!