[Coco] 83,797 MIDI Files..........

[Glen Hewlett]

Yes Allen you get it exactly!

My converter started out as a command line utility but then I realized that the user is going to need more control over which tracks to select for the song.  So it currently displays all the tracks that have music data and shows them on screen, similar to how GarageBand shows the tracks. Then for each track you can select which voice you want to use or not use for the conversion.

Once you’ve picked the tracks you want and what voices you want to use for those tracks you hit the space bar and the program asks which output format you want (one of the three I mentioned earlier) and then it will generate the music in a format that the CoCo can play back.

As per Bill's comments, I’ve been testing my converter with many MIDI files already and many of them can be converted into something enjoyable to listen to on the CoCo. These sound devices aren’t made for replicating an orchestra but they can add some nice simple music to the CoCo.  Using MIDI format we can hopefully inspire some musicians to write music and have fun playing that music on their CoCo.

I can see it is possible for the CoCo to do the conversion directly of an entire midi file with tons of multi note instruments including drums and playing it all back with all the voices!

This is how I see it working… You would need to have all the instrument samples in RAM on a 512k CoCo 3 loaded from the CoCoSDC.  Then read the MIDI file off the SD card in Logical Sector mode as a regular file stored on the SD card in the CoCoSDC (just like Ed Snider’s CoCoSDC video and audio player reads files off the SD card directly, not files inside a .DSK image) go through the midi data and mix all the notes from all the instruments that are playing at that moment in time and output the mixed samples as the song data to the CoCoSDC.  Then continue along processing the entire MIDI file into multiple .DSK images (if it’s a very long song).  Then you simply playback your converted song that was created on the .DSK images as samples of data through the CoCo DAC.

This would take a ton of work to write including some heavy duty math routines to get the mixing of all those instruments.  But this technique would allow for almost any amount of musical notes to be played at one time.  I’m not saying I’m going to write such a program, it’s just a method I think that would work and something I thought would be incredible to see the CoCo do!

Cheers,
Glen

> On Nov 9, 2017, at 5:07 PM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Nov 9, 2017, at 3:02 PM, Glen Hewlett <glen.hewlett at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> I’m currently working on a MIDI converter that will take both MIDI format 0 and a format 1 and convert them to music data that can be played back on the CoCo using either of these methods:
> 
> I *LOVE* this idea, and here’s why ...
> 
> While, as Bill pointed out, it’s not useful for playing a modern big MIDI file, it is a GREAT way to create music for CoCo projects. I can create music in GarageBand on my Mac, using a few tracks, and export that to a MIDI file that could then be data for the CoCo. Excellent.
> 
> (The stuff I am working with John Strong on is also using MIDI as the format for music to feed the sound chip.)
> 
> My first MIDI synthesizer, a Casio CZ-101, could only play 4 notes at a time (8 at lesser quality). There were a ton of MIDI files that targeted it back in the day, so there’s likely still a ton of things out there for the early years of much-more-limited MIDI devices, too.
> 
> 		— A
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