[Coco] MIDI with drivewire 4

[Bill Pierce]

No, not UM3play, the new one is MPlay9. It plays standard midi files but as I said, it's a bit of a memory hog and I think it's internally set for midi format 0 for now though Mike's docs said it would play both midi format 0 and 1. The difference in midi fmt 0, is all notes are in one big track, the sequencer sorts them by channel to tracks. Midi frmt 1 is organized by each track being a seperate file chunk therefore allowing a track to have more than one channel. (I think I have that right).
 I hope to be updating this player soon as it works nice, it just needs some filters on load-in to quit loading all the text trash and sysex stuff then the files won't be as large.

Bill P

Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Bill Pierce
ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, Oct 4, 2012 1:45 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] MIDI with drivewire 4


On Thursday 04 October 2012 01:29:15 Bill Pierce did opine:

> 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"

Humm, ISTR I have sent a .mid file to /dev/midi, which is the midi synth 
input of my audigy2 Value card, with something like cp and it worked.  But 
its a lot handier to fire up timidity or rosegarden, load it up & see the 
animation play (the coco .mid files aren't 100% compatible for some reason) 
but most of the stuff I have grabbed off the net seems to work.

dw has the advantage though as it has a fairly easy to configure note and 
voice translator so it will match the sound you might get out of a Roland 
or yamaha keyboard before GM became a somewhat loose std.  My card has to 
have a sound font loaded first, using one of the awe utilities else its 
either muted or makes raw noise.

I haven't set it for that since I switched to ubuntu from pclos, mandriva 
before that.  I believe I was running mandriva 2007 or 2008 then.  IOW I 
can't prove it at the moment.  And while I have surprised my music teacher 
wife by picking out and playing the base line from sheet music on her piano 
so I can practice a bit before choir, and I can stumble around on a 
gitfiddle, I will never claim I can play either.

> 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.

UM3play?  Yeah, it worked, but seemed overly picky.

> 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.
> 
> Bill P
> 
> Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
> https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
> Bill Pierce
> ooogalapasooo at aol.com
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> 
> In the dw bootfile, add the MIDI descriptor, which effectively replaces
> the last /N path in dw.  list or copy a .mid file to >/MIDI and if the
> pc side is setup correctly, it should play through the sound cards midi
> synth in the pc.
> 
> > Regards, Bob Devries
> > Dalby, QLD, Australia
> > 
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 
> Cheers, Gene


Cheers, Gene
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