[Coco] MIDI with drivewire 4

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Gene,
>  In theory, that should work, but in reality it's a midi disaster. A midi file has no "clock" so therefore it will just "blast" the DW drive with data as fast as list can send it. There has to be software to send the bytes at proper intervals for it to be "musical". All midi timing is the job of the sender, the reciever just "plays it as it sees it" That's why there was so many requests for a "Standard Midi" player back in the old days.
>  I actually have one I'm going to release soon. Mike Knudson started it back in the 90s but it's a memory hog and needs to be tamed to play properly. A modified version of it is included with the latest release of Sound Chaser. It just stops loading tracks when memory is full and plays what it has. If the first track is too big for memory, it aborts.
>

Actually, with DW it will work to just dump a standard gm file to a /N
device, because DW notices its a gm file and sends it to the
sequencers rather than throwing it at the synth or output.  That's
probably what Gene was referring to.  However, that is also a dirty
hack and only exists because I wanted a simple way to test parts of
the MIDI system in the server :)  The feature may go away in some
future version, you really should do the sequencing on the coco side
like it was a normal midi port.