page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (03/12/88)
The April issue of Electronic Musician has a survey of computers for making music. There are articles on tha Amiga, ST, PC and Mac. The Amiga article is pretty well written, the guy is real Amiga zealot. (but aren't they all?) It lists a large number of packages either available or available RSN. Of particular note is M and Jam Factory .. in fact, the packages are listed in the NAMM report, mentioned in the Amiga article, and even in an advertisement! In the NAMM report of "what's hot and what's cold" ... last year they crowned the Amiga "cold" because of the lack of music software. This year, the Amiga gets a special mention because of the wealth of music software becoming available. The Amiga is also favorably mentioned in the April Keyboard magazine. It hurts to see two-page Atari and Apple ads in both magazines, but no Amiga ads. The C-64 was THE music computer for a long time; there's no reason for CBM not to exploit that and promote the A500 as the next generation music machine. ..Bob -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page "I don't know such stuff. I just do eyes." -- from 'Blade Runner'
haitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) (03/13/88)
I also found an intersting Amiga article in a magazine I sometimes
buy called MCS (Music, Computures & Software). It's the Feb/Mar issue with
Sting on the cover (the Amiga is shown in the upper right corner). It
surprises me that they would run the article considering how much Atari and
MAC advertising appears in the magazine. Maybe they have some integrity
(unlike certain computer magazines we all hate (I hope)) :^).
Have fun,
Wade.
UUCP: {cbosgd, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!pnet01!haitex
ARPA: crash!pnet01!haitex@nosc.mil
INET: haitex@pnet01.CTS.COMmark@sunquest.UUCP (Mark Langley) (11/04/88)
I am a computer scientist who has taken a recent interest
in digital music. I also have an Amiga.
I want to hook up a Yamaha CVP digital piano to my amiga through
a MIDI interface. As I understand it I need to purchase some
extra hardware (< $100) to make my serial port talk MIDI.
(I have a ``Medix'' on order =$50...)
Are there any public domain programs for interpretting the
MIDI format? How about some transcription programs?
I am prepared to start from scratch, reading bytes off the port
and interpretting them with the help of The_Last_MIDI_Book, but
would appreciate any help I can get.
Any advice from net land would be welcome! Any suggested reading?
Thanks in advance!
Mark Langley
mark@sunquest.com
{arizona,uunet}!sunquest!markpmy@vivaldi.acc.Virginia.EDU.acc.virginia.edu (Pete Yadlowsky) (11/05/88)
In article <154@sunquest.UUCP> mark@sunquest.UUCP (Mark Langley) writes: >Are there any public domain programs for interpretting the >MIDI format? Yes. >I am prepared to start from scratch, reading bytes off the port Ack! No. Don't do that. I can't, in good conscience, allow anyone to suffer through that. :-) Bill Barton posted the latest version of his midi.library to PeopleLink some time ago. This thing takes all the drudgery out of MIDI. The programmer need never touch the serial device and message parsing is automatic. The library plugs into Exec and so supports inter-task messaging in the traditional Amiga manner. It also automatically handles message filtering, merging and copying. Anyway, it's about time I posted to the net again, as there have been a few requests (hi Tad). Gimme a few days to bundle things together. The package will include the .library itself, documents, a bunch of .h files, two midi.lib stub files (lattice and manx) and a few small applications. Oh yeah, I'll also throw in a couple of files that provide JForth hooks to the library, for all you JForthers and HMSLers out there. Brace yerselves. Peter M. Yadlowsky Academic Computing Center University of Virginia pmy@vivaldi.acc.Virginia.EDU
john.russell@canremote.uucp (JOHN RUSSELL) (12/03/89)
There is an aspect of the C64's music that has been largely lost on the Amiga. Since we suddenly have a sound chip that can accurately reproduce real-life sounds, everyone has rushed to do so with digitized samples and instruments. But what comes out of this is generally not of any better quality than we hear all the time on the radio, in commercials, etc. I mean this in terms of the quality of the music (how many original compositions does your local BBS have in its download area, as opposed to transcriptions of sheet music?) and the quality of the sound. To wit: on the 64, where programmers didn't hesitate to take full advantage of the sound chip, we had things like Synth Sample which played prodigious amounts of music utilizing many, many different "instrument sounds". If someone wanted to put a bit of expression into a piece there were plenty of tremolo effects, glisses, distortions (ring modulation), and other variations that: w3ere availab+ke with little more than POKE 54272, ... On the Amiga, where the sound is amazingly better but also much more complicated to use, everyone has taken the easy way out. So much easier to digitize a trumpet playing one note, then stretch or squeeze the waveform to play other notes. Hey, it only takes 20-30K per instrument! And if you want to simulate a mute, the music programs will let you tweak some parameters zVand sw3#c1ave yourself a new instrument_. No big deal, why you can fit a couple of dozen instruments on a floppy. Maybe not quite that many in chip memory -- of course by this time you have been forced to upgrade to 1M chip. The result? You can hardly find a music sample that doesn't require you to have expanded memory, a spare empty disk to devote to its instruments, and stixDll there are no more than a couple of dozen unique sounds in the piece.YG: The solution? Either the music programs start letting you dynamically adjust the parameters of instruments in memory while they're playing, or dedicated musicians start taking up C programming and buying RKMs. John --- * Via ProDoor 3.1R
john.russell%canremote.uucp@cunyvm.cuny.edu (12/16/89)
There is an aspect of the C64's music that has been largely lost on the Amiga. Since we suddenly have a sound chip that can accurately reproduce real-life sounds, everyone has rushed to do so with digitized samples and instruments. But what comes out of this is generally not of any better quality than we hear all the time on the radio, in commercials, etc. I mean this in terms of the quality of the music (how many original compositions does your local BBS have in its download area, as opposed to transcriptions of sheet music?) and the quality of the sound. To wit: on the 64, where programmers didn't hesitate to take full advantage of the sound chip, we had things like Synth Sample which played prodigious amounts of music utilizing many, many different "instrument sounds". If someone wanted to put a bit of expression into a piece there were plenty of tremolo effects, glisses, distortions (ring modulation), and other variations that: w3ere availab+ke with little more than POKE 54272, ... On the Amiga, where the sound is amazingly better but also much more complicated to use, everyone has taken the easy way out. So much easier to digitize a trumpet playing one note, then stretch or squeeze the waveform to play other notes. Hey, it only takes 20-30K per instrument! And if you want to simulate a mute, the music programs will let you tweak some parameters zVand sw3#c1ave yourself a new instrument_. No big deal, why you can fit a couple of dozen instruments on a floppy. Maybe not quite that many in chip memory -- of course by this time you have been forced to upgrade to 1M chip. The result? You can hardly find a music sample that doesn't require you to have expanded memory, a spare empty disk to devote to its instruments, and stixDll there are no more than a couple of dozen unique sounds in the piece.YG: The solution? Either the music programs start letting you dynamically adjust the parameters of instruments in memory while they're playing, or dedicated musicians start taking up C programming and buying RKMs. John --- * Via ProDoor 3.1R